Character etymology for newbie "street argument" 有

mandarinboy
 September 09, 2008, 03:43 AM posted in General Discussion

One of the most frequent characters in Chinese.

Character: 有

Pinyin: yǒu

Meaning: have, own, possess; exist

HSK level: 1 (basic)

Frequency: 8

Strokes: 6  

Radical part: 月

Stroke order: http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/character-stroke-order.php?searchChinese=1&zi=%E6%9C%89

Etymology: The original shape:

 

 

 

 

Represents a hand reaching for a piece of meat. The right part is the arm with the hand with only three fingers and the meat is having fat or bones inside. Since meat and moon looks so much alike the character soon changed from meat to moon. My teacher made jokes around this and stated that this is the first proof of woman always wanting more from the man. To give her meat where not enough so she demanded the moon so the man had to try to get hold of the moon instead for her

Example words with 有:

有的          yǒude            (there are) some
有名          yǒumíng        famous; well-known
有些          yǒuxiē           some; somewhat
有时候      yǒu shíhou   sometimes

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calkins
 September 09, 2008, 03:58 AM

mandarinboy, I love these etymologies...thanks for taking the time!

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mandarinboy
 September 09, 2008, 04:05 AM

You are welcome, it is just my way of dealing with jetlag:-) For once I seem to have trouble getting back in Swedish time and wake up Japanese time every morning  and then I can as well study some Chinese.

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bababardwan
 September 09, 2008, 04:10 AM

mandarinboy,

Thankyou so much.This is great ! Exactly what I've been looking for.I'm not only interested in learning the characters,but in the story behind them.You're doing a fantastic job.Thanks again.

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mandarinboy
 September 09, 2008, 04:15 AM

By the way, if anyone finds any misstakes with the storke order animations, please let me know. I do not have anything to do with yellowbridge but I did do the stroke order data they are using. The applet that they are using is written by the guy behind www.zhongwen.com. Since i wrote the code for the strokeorder while studying Japanese i have found some misstakes but they are corrected now.  The same data is used by many other programs as well, like ZDT.

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changye
 September 09, 2008, 06:11 AM

A nice etymology for the phrase "ask for the moon" !