[Multilingual Monday] Semantic Shifts

[aadroma]

It's somewhat well-known that the English word awful had a far different meaning about 300 years ago or so. At that point in time, it meant "majestic" -- being full of awe (awe having gone from "something that provides terror" and gradually shifted due to interpratations of the wonders of God, the original source of "fear" from the original

Comments

[muckefuck]

Many Chinese characters have had some shift in meaning -- 能 was at one point "bear" until it started to be used to mean "capable", and then a fire radical was shoved underneath and suddenly you have a new "bear", 熊.

Roll your eyes at my pedantry, go ahead, but this is somewhat different phenomenon. In this case, there wasn't one word that changed its meaning (as in the case of awful) but rather two words that happened to share a written form until one was given a unique character.

The problem with pictographs is that they're far better at representing some concepts than others. You can easily draw a picture of a bear; how do you illustrate an abstraction like "capacity"? One solution employed by the ancient Chinese was the so-called "rebus principle": Use a picture of a concrete object whose name is similar in sound to your abstraction. So, in the same way that a honeybee represents "be" in an English rebus, a stalk of wheat (來) comes to represent "come", a scorpion (萬) illustrates "10,000", and a bear (熊) comes to stand for "can".

Of course, by solving a problem of representation, you've gone and created one of homophony. Some of these problems worked out over time (e.g. the first two examples, where different words came into use for "wheat" [麥] and "scorpion" [蠍], respectively). But the word for "bear" remained constant in Chinese, so eventually the solution was to add another fire radical to 能 to make a new character. This eventually became the chief method of forming new characters. It has also been used to distinguish specific senses of existing words, so you'll get, for instance, an "eat" radical added to the character for "wrap" (包) in order to distinguish the meaning "bun". So I could see where confusion could come in as to whether two characters which share a phonetic were originally the "same word" or two similar-sounding ones that were simply forced to share a character at one time.

[aadroma]

No, you're certainly right, it is a somewhat different phenomenon, but it's still a chang in written meaning -- at some point in time, character for X stopped meaning X, though it was an admittedly poor example. If you have another that better fits the phenomenon we're discussing -- go for it. However, in my experience, the "borrowed character meaning causes the creation of a new character" phenomenon is far more common.

So I'll ask you: do you have an example in modern Chinese where 亂 still retains meaning of "control"?

[muckefuck]

Wow, I didn't even realise that was the ancient meaning! I can't think of a single example--that's a real doozy of a change!

[aadroma]

I have several references for this too that state the character's original meaning, and one has stated (without example, of course) that it is still a minor meaning in modern Chinese. If it is, I certainly haven't seen it either, but if I do, I'll certainly post it!