3 ms·

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

• 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.