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Man if you really want to trace the etymology of Chinese characters it gets to be a really long and crazy affair. You inadvertently stumbled across a thorny exa

Man if you really want to trace the etymology of Chinese characters it gets to be a really long and crazy affair. You inadvertently stumbled across a thorny example. The history of 晴 indicates pretty clearly that 青 is meant to be a phonetic compound rather than a semantic one, but it's not obvious how that came about. 晴 originated as the character 夝 and originally meant a clear night with visible stars after the rain has stopped (夝 is a 形声字 where 夕 means dusk or night and 生 is the phonetic compound) rather than a clear day. By focusing on the stars, we got alternate "spellings" of 暒 (which is a cross between using 星 phonetically and semantically) and 精 (borrowing its connotation of brightness). Gradually this focus on stars became a focus on brightness while maintaining the original "clearness." The latter character 精 then kept its phonetic component 青 and got a new semantic component 日 to distinguish itself from 精 and that's how we got 晴.

greggman3 6y ago
That's fascinating! Doesn't that mean it's 青 that's the phonetic part? It means blue. blue day certainly is a fitting compound meaning regardless of its origin. On the other hand, no idea why moon and that radical (life?) = blue so that part is phontic?
- dwohnitmok 6y ago
  > Doesn't that mean it's 青 that's the phonetic part? I'm confused. That's indeed what I said and what the article states and what the original parent comment stated. > On the other hand, no idea why moon and that radical (life?) = blue so that part is phontic? That's not quite the direct evidence that 青 is phonetic rather than semantic. It's because already in 精青 is not a semantic component but rather a phonetic one. In particular 精 was being used to describe clear, sunny days before the existence of 晴. Its semantic compound was then replaced with 日 to disambiguate this new meaning of 精 [0]. So the jump from 精 to 晴 is treating 青 as a phonetic component as well. [0] "Replaced with" indicates an intentionality that may or may not have actually occurred. We don't have any records of someone literally coming out and saying "yeah I think 精 has too many meanings, I'm going to replace one of them with 晴." It's plausible that what may have occurred is the independent growth of a variant character 晴 that occurred after the rise of 精 that eventually supplanted 精. Regardless the existence of 精 is a pretty clear signal that it was the phonetic quality of 青 that was being used.

greggman3 6y ago

That's fascinating! Doesn't that mean it's 青 that's the phonetic part? It means blue. blue day certainly is a fitting compound meaning regardless of its origin. On the other hand, no idea why moon and that radical (life?) = blue so that part is phontic?

dwohnitmok 6y ago
> Doesn't that mean it's 青 that's the phonetic part? I'm confused. That's indeed what I said and what the article states and what the original parent comment stated. > On the other hand, no idea why moon and that radical (life?) = blue so that part is phontic? That's not quite the direct evidence that 青 is phonetic rather than semantic. It's because already in 精青 is not a semantic component but rather a phonetic one. In particular 精 was being used to describe clear, sunny days before the existence of 晴. Its semantic compound was then replaced with 日 to disambiguate this new meaning of 精 [0]. So the jump from 精 to 晴 is treating 青 as a phonetic component as well. [0] "Replaced with" indicates an intentionality that may or may not have actually occurred. We don't have any records of someone literally coming out and saying "yeah I think 精 has too many meanings, I'm going to replace one of them with 晴." It's plausible that what may have occurred is the independent growth of a variant character 晴 that occurred after the rise of 精 that eventually supplanted 精. Regardless the existence of 精 is a pretty clear signal that it was the phonetic quality of 青 that was being used.