I don't speak Chinese but I've encountered this series a lot: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%AA%BD#Chinese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%AA%BD#Chinese

I don't speak Chinese but I've encountered this series a lot: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%AA%BD#Chinese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%AA%BD#Chinese 媽 mā 'mother' https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%BA%BB#Chinese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%BA%BB#Chinese 麻 má 'hemp' (sometimes 'flax') https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Chinese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Chinese 馬 mǎ 'horse' https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%BD%B5#Chinese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%BD%B5#Chinese 罵 mà 'scold' It's also cool that you can see that 媽 is made up of "semantic 女 + phonetic 馬", where 女 means 'lady' and 馬 sounds like "ma", so the character was meant to suggest "a word relating to ladies that sounds like ma". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Phono-semantic_compound_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...