<p>(yeah, right, downvote. Don't write your own researched writing, just press a button. Boooooo!)</p>

<p>Okay, you folks all missed it. (by the way, @peter : "di" sounds somewhat like "ta", see below).</p>

<h2>The AMAZING history of《也》...</h2>

<p>Turns out that 《也》 has an amazing history, and has taken on three <em>distinct</em> meanings over that annoying <em>"five thousand years of Chinese history"</em> that you always hear about. The morphology is simply amazing.</p>

<h3>Modern Meaning</h3>

<p>The modern "also"《也》(ye) is somehow a bastardization of《亦》(yi)...It is unclear how this happened, but you can see how they KIND-A look the same.</p>

<h3>Post-Oracle Bone Meaning</h3>

<p>In ancient chinese, you didn't say</p>

<pre><code>Oranges are fruit
</code></pre>

<p>you said:</p>

<pre><code>Oranges this, fruit that

橙是果也
</code></pre>

<p>Here, 《也》is a completely different word from the modern character. In the ancient meaning, it was "that", and was pronounced closer to "ta". Hence《他》("ta") for "him" and 《地》 ("di") for ground.</p>

<p>Along the way, the 《也》 got dropped, leaving just 《是》 (shi), which then became "is", if only because the "that" part of the sentence disappeared, so what the heck, why not?</p>

<h2>Hold up, it gets better...</h2>

<h3>"Down home" Oracle Bone-Era Meaning</h3>

<p>《也》as "that" is in itself a loan character from the very EARLY Zhou Dynasty era, when "concept words" repurposed mostly unused characters. Turns out Oracle Bone-era Chinese writing was centered on pretty basic stuff ("will it rain?", "will my cow die?"), so most characters were pretty basic.</p>

<p><strong>文 and 字</strong></p>

<p>These characters were referred to as 《文》, and tended to be actual pictographs, while fancy stuff made up of multiple characters glomed together were referred to as 《字》. Hence the term 《文字》. In fact, 《文》is itself a 文, and 《字》 is itself a 字！</p>

<p><strong>Fun Tangent</strong></p>

<p>《愛》(ai), "to love" Is an early 字. It didn't mean "hey gal, I luv ya!", it meant to lovingly take care of someone or something, and was a picture of a mother taking her toddler out for a walk (even wearing his cute little baby booties if you can believe it!!!), with a heart thrown in to show the care implied.</p>

<p><strong>Back to the story...</strong></p>

<p>During Zhou, scribes needed to write down concepts which didn't have 文 ... how else were they going to write the various classics? They couldn't just go on and on about cows, rain and meat, so they had to do SOMETHING.</p>

<p>So they borrowed 文 that SOUNDED like the concept words they needed to write down. It appears that they didn't modify sound-alike characters, they just reused them! So for a period of time, a character had two meanings: the "down home" 文 meaning like "dustpan"(《其》) or "scorpion" (《萬》), and the conceptual meaning like "them" or "10,000". The likelihood of using "dustpan" and "that group over there" was pretty small. So it kind-a worked. But still,</p>

<p><strong>...that's not confusing at all...</strong></p>

<p>When the "radical" system was invented later, the original "down home" use of the 文 was often remapped to a 字,with a radical attached to provide category meaning (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know radical is a lookup method...shaddap already...). So 《其》 became 《箕》 by adding a bamboo radical (so now you know what dustpans were made out of back then!)</p>

<p>Sometimes, the ancient, down home 文 use was just lost, and another word and/or character took the "down home" meaning.</p>

<p><strong>But what about 《也》?</strong></p>

<p>I don't mean to leave you with a cliffhanger, but sadly, I won't be telling you what the actual oracle bone-era meaning was, will let you look up yourself...it's pretty...ummmm, surprising. So much so that caused quite a bit of stir over the years as embarrassed scholars tried to deny it. In fact, you can still see the "NO NO NO NO, THAT'S NOT RIGHT!" annotations added to the ancient dictionaries.</p>

<p>To this day, the down home meaning was somewhat controversial, with a nonsense definition of "water pail" being insisted upon. But the real meaning is pretty well accepted now.</p>

<p><strong>The end.</strong></p>

<h2>Addendum: Examples of 文 and 字</h2>

<p>Here are some examples of ancient characters (古文) that lost their down home meanings, and how they got replaced with 字. Note that the first example looks like a 字, but it's really a 文.</p>

<pre><code>文: modern/ancient meaning, down home meaning, replacement 字    
萬：10k, scorpion, 蠆
其：conceptual theirs/his/that stuff over there, dust pan, 箕
為: to be/for/etc., monkey (or possibly elephant), 猴 (or possibly 象)
也：also/concrete "that", &lt;redacted&gt;, &lt;redacted&gt;
</code></pre>

<p><em>PS: For those who don't know what "down home" means, it's a southern US term for backwoods, countryside things. In Chinese, you'd say 《土》.</em></p>

<p>References: (require knowledge of Chinese)</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf/search.php?word=%E4%B9%9F" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf/search.php?word=也</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.zdic.net/z/15/sw/4E5F.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.zdic.net/z/15/sw/4E5F.htm</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.zdic.net/z/1e/sw/7231.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.zdic.net/z/1e/sw/7231.htm</a></li>
</ul>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-04-20T19:51:29.053Z
Sorry, half of this information is incorrect...For starters, 橙是果也 is absolutely wrong, it’s just 橙果也. 愛 is not a picture of a mum taking out her toddler for a walk, it was from phonetic 旡 and semantic 心. I hope you consider heavily revising (deleting) this answer, especially the bold heading “we missed it”, which looks ... on an answer chock full of inaccurate information.
dROOOze
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-04-20T02:19:12.447Z
2019-04-25T17:55:26.960Z
2019-04-25T17:55:26.960Z
Mark Gerolimatos
<p>Please refer to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstructions_of_Old_Chinese" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Old Chinese reconstructions</a> when analysing phonetic components of characters.</p>

<p>他 - Baxter-Sagart OC: <strong>/*l̥ˤaj/</strong> > <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Chinese" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MC</a>: <strong>/tʰɑ/</strong> > Mandarin Pinyin: <strong>tā</strong></p>

<p>也 - Baxter-Sagart OC: <strong>/*lAjʔ/</strong> > MC: <strong>/jia<sup>X</sup>/</strong> > Mandarin Pinyin: <strong>yě</strong></p>

<blockquote>
  <p>有部首旁的汉字的发音通常按照没有部首旁的字。</p>
</blockquote>

<p>You should probably learn that 部首 is a dictionary indexing tool, and has nothing to do with the functions of character components.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-26T19:09:54.123Z
indeed. I was just taking a swing at it. No idea whatsoever how to say the generic form of 人旁的《字》、心旁的《字》 等, nor am I actually certain that there IS a way to say it. Also, look at that: the two characters WERE the same up until middle Chinese!  (note that I am guessing here, as I have no clue at all how to read those squiggly letters)
Mark Gerolimatos
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-26T11:12:50.447Z
2019-03-26T14:14:21.870Z
2019-03-26T14:14:21.870Z
dROOOze
<blockquote>
  <p>有部首旁的汉字的发音通常按照没有部首旁的字</p>
</blockquote>

<p>well, this assumption is <strong>incorrect</strong></p>

<p>an example:</p>

<p>潢．熿．獚．璜．磺．穔．簧．蟥．趪．鷬 and 黃, all share the same pronunciation wong4</p>

<p><a href="http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf/search.php?word=%E9%BB%83" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf/search.php?word=黃</a></p>

<p>so, what about <h1>黌</h1></p>

<p>it has the component 黃 in the bottom part. unfortunately, this one is pronounce as hung4</p>

<p><a href="http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf/search.php?word=%E9%BB%8C" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf/search.php?word=黌</a></p>

<p>the moral is: don't assume the pronunciation of any chinese character.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-26T19:02:48.797Z
Wait. You just proved my point. "wong" and "hong" are the same in many dialects. But "ta" and "ye" are most definitely not.
Mark Gerolimatos
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-26T13:07:47.197Z
2019-03-26T13:07:47.197Z
水巷孑蠻
<p>Words "come" and "become" pronounce similarly. So you think "也" and "他" should also make like this way, right?</p>

<p>This is no Chinese thinking mind, if you study more, you will see lots of similar samples, even "己" and "已" are different on pronunciation and meaning also.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-26T19:06:59.743Z
Incorrect. 已 and 己 are *completely different characters* that just happen to look somewhat the same when converted to 正楷. 他 and 也 are in fact *the same* character (at least the phonetic part). There's more going on here, I guarantee you.
Mark Gerolimatos
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-26T19:39:51.590Z
The "phonetic portion" method is very much a part of how Chinese characters work, and has been in place since the Zhou dynasty. You are SUPPOSED to be able to rely on the non-radical portion to guess pronunciation.
Mark Gerolimatos
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-27T09:10:19.557Z
hi @MarkGerolimatos , I think you follow a thinking mind that the character seems like similar so the pronunciation also should be similar. That is why I say so. Or I can provide another example, like 环 and 不
vincent zhang
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-27T09:57:13.130Z
ummmmm...you DO know that 环 is really 環 , which IS pronunced somewhat like 睘 . Not incredibly close, but not nealy as far as huan and qiong
Mark Gerolimatos
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-27T09:57:52.580Z
and yes, I AM saying PRECISELY that
Mark Gerolimatos
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-27T13:53:52.113Z
Hahaha, emm....well, your have a good Chinese level, keep going, I admire you, I am learning Spanish at the moment, hope as good as you in Chinese
vincent zhang
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-26T13:19:07.580Z
2019-03-26T13:19:07.580Z
vincent zhang
<p>Oh great. I have to ask in English to get it past StackExchange filters.
Characters with radicals typically have pronunciations close to the bare character.
For example: "韦“ (wei) versus "伟“ (wei) or "敢“ (gan) versus "憨“ (han)
But "也" (ye) and "他“ (ta) are very much exceptions. Why?</p>

<p>有部首旁的汉字的发音通常按照没有部首旁的字。 例如 “韦”/”伟“、 “清”/“青”、 “敢”/“憨”等。</p>

<p>但是 “也”/“他” 根本在例外。为什么？</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-26T10:18:46.903Z
The readings of characters have changed a lot.
fefe
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-26T10:28:57.977Z
Yeah, that would certainly seem to be the case. But "也" is so commonly used that it seems a little strange.
Mark Gerolimatos
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-26T13:35:44.663Z
Can you specify what you mean by a `没有部首旁的字`?
dROOOze
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-26T19:08:30.763Z
I actually don't know if there's an official term for "has a radical on the side" in Chinese. one sez 人旁的《字》, so I just took as swing at it and guessed that was the way to say it.
Mark Gerolimatos
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-27T15:50:54.093Z
What's wrong with asking in English? SE is not purely an Q/A website. It is supposed to provide people knowledge not just satisfy people own needs, using a single language is an requirement to achieve this , people who can search questions using one certain language, without worrying about language barrial. And avoid much duplication that only differ in language.
炸鱼薯条德里克
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-04-08T20:43:57.130Z
I asked myself the same thing and gave up.  Then I came across 地 (dì) in 地铁 (subway).  I've temporarily came to the conclusion that characters with 也 fall into exceptions...until I learn more.
Peter
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-05-07T12:30:06.937Z
See my answer on https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17063/glyph-origin-of-%E4%B9%9F/17067#17067 for a more general discussion about the 也 phonetic series.
Michaelyus
<pronunciation><etymology><radicals>
为什么 “也” 发音为 "ye" 但是 “他”发音为"ta"？？？
# 为什么 “也” 发音为 "ye" 但是 “他”发音为"ta"？？？

(Asked by: username_0 on 2019-03-26)

Oh great. I have to ask in English to get it past StackExchange filters.
Characters with radicals typically have pronunciations close to the bare character.
For example: "韦“ (wei) versus "伟“ (wei) or "敢“ (gan) versus "憨“ (han)
But "也" (ye) and "他“ (ta) are very much exceptions. Why?

有部首旁的汉字的发音通常按照没有部首旁的字。 例如 “韦”/”伟“、 “清”/“青”、 “敢”/“憨”等。

但是 “也”/“他” 根本在例外。为什么？

**Tags:** pronunciation, etymology, radicals

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: The readings of characters have changed a lot.  
> **username_0**: Yeah, that would certainly seem to be the case. But "也" is so commonly used that it seems a little strange.  
> **username_2**: Can you specify what you mean by a `没有部首旁的字`?  
> **username_0**: I actually don't know if there's an official term for "has a radical on the side" in Chinese. one sez 人旁的《字》, so I just took as swing at it and guessed that was the way to say it.  
> **username_3**: What's wrong with asking in English? SE is not purely an Q/A website. It is supposed to provide people knowledge not just satisfy people own needs, using a single language is an requirement to achieve this , people who can search questions using one certain language, without worrying about language barrial. And avoid much duplication that only differ in language.  
> **username_4**: I asked myself the same thing and gave up.  Then I came across 地 (dì) in 地铁 (subway).  I've temporarily came to the conclusion that characters with 也 fall into exceptions...until I learn more.  
> **username_5**: See my answer on https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17063/glyph-origin-of-%E4%B9%9F/17067#17067 for a more general discussion about the 也 phonetic series.  

---

## 4 answers

### Answer by username_0 on 2019-04-20. Score: -2 | Accepted answer

(yeah, right, downvote. Don't write your own researched writing, just press a button. Boooooo!)

Okay, you folks all missed it. (by the way, @username_4 : "di" sounds somewhat like "ta", see below).

## The AMAZING history of《也》...

Turns out that 《也》 has an amazing history, and has taken on three *distinct* meanings over that annoying *"five thousand years of Chinese history"* that you always hear about. The morphology is simply amazing.

### Modern Meaning

The modern "also"《也》(ye) is somehow a bastardization of《亦》(yi)...It is unclear how this happened, but you can see how they KIND-A look the same.

### Post-Oracle Bone Meaning

In ancient chinese, you didn't say

```
Oranges are fruit

```

you said:

```
Oranges this, fruit that

橙是果也

```

Here, 《也》is a completely different word from the modern character. In the ancient meaning, it was "that", and was pronounced closer to "ta". Hence《他》("ta") for "him" and 《地》 ("di") for ground.

Along the way, the 《也》 got dropped, leaving just 《是》 (shi), which then became "is", if only because the "that" part of the sentence disappeared, so what the heck, why not?

## Hold up, it gets better...

### "Down home" Oracle Bone-Era Meaning

《也》as "that" is in itself a loan character from the very EARLY Zhou Dynasty era, when "concept words" repurposed mostly unused characters. Turns out Oracle Bone-era Chinese writing was centered on pretty basic stuff ("will it rain?", "will my cow die?"), so most characters were pretty basic.

**文 and 字**

These characters were referred to as 《文》, and tended to be actual pictographs, while fancy stuff made up of multiple characters glomed together were referred to as 《字》. Hence the term 《文字》. In fact, 《文》is itself a 文, and 《字》 is itself a 字！

**Fun Tangent**

《愛》(ai), "to love" Is an early 字. It didn't mean "hey gal, I luv ya!", it meant to lovingly take care of someone or something, and was a picture of a mother taking her toddler out for a walk (even wearing his cute little baby booties if you can believe it!!!), with a heart thrown in to show the care implied.

**Back to the story...**

During Zhou, scribes needed to write down concepts which didn't have 文 ... how else were they going to write the various classics? They couldn't just go on and on about cows, rain and meat, so they had to do SOMETHING.

So they borrowed 文 that SOUNDED like the concept words they needed to write down. It appears that they didn't modify sound-alike characters, they just reused them! So for a period of time, a character had two meanings: the "down home" 文 meaning like "dustpan"(《其》) or "scorpion" (《萬》), and the conceptual meaning like "them" or "10,000". The likelihood of using "dustpan" and "that group over there" was pretty small. So it kind-a worked. But still,

**...that's not confusing at all...**

When the "radical" system was invented later, the original "down home" use of the 文 was often remapped to a 字,with a radical attached to provide category meaning (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know radical is a lookup method...shaddap already...). So 《其》 became 《箕》 by adding a bamboo radical (so now you know what dustpans were made out of back then!)

Sometimes, the ancient, down home 文 use was just lost, and another word and/or character took the "down home" meaning.

**But what about 《也》?**

I don't mean to leave you with a cliffhanger, but sadly, I won't be telling you what the actual oracle bone-era meaning was, will let you look up yourself...it's pretty...ummmm, surprising. So much so that caused quite a bit of stir over the years as embarrassed scholars tried to deny it. In fact, you can still see the "NO NO NO NO, THAT'S NOT RIGHT!" annotations added to the ancient dictionaries.

To this day, the down home meaning was somewhat controversial, with a nonsense definition of "water pail" being insisted upon. But the real meaning is pretty well accepted now.

**The end.**

## Addendum: Examples of 文 and 字

Here are some examples of ancient characters (古文) that lost their down home meanings, and how they got replaced with 字. Note that the first example looks like a 字, but it's really a 文.

```
文: modern/ancient meaning, down home meaning, replacement 字    
萬：10k, scorpion, 蠆
其：conceptual theirs/his/that stuff over there, dust pan, 箕
為: to be/for/etc., monkey (or possibly elephant), 猴 (or possibly 象)
也：also/concrete "that", <redacted>, <redacted>

```

*PS: For those who don't know what "down home" means, it's a southern US term for backwoods, countryside things. In Chinese, you'd say 《土》.*

References: (require knowledge of Chinese)

* [https://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf/search.php?word=也](https://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf/search.php?word=%E4%B9%9F)
* <http://www.zdic.net/z/15/sw/4E5F.htm>
* <http://www.zdic.net/z/1e/sw/7231.htm>

> **Comments:**
> **username_2**: Sorry, half of this information is incorrect...For starters, 橙是果也 is absolutely wrong, it’s just 橙果也. 愛 is not a picture of a mum taking out her toddler for a walk, it was from phonetic 旡 and semantic 心. I hope you consider heavily revising (deleting) this answer, especially the bold heading “we missed it”, which looks ... on an answer chock full of inaccurate information.  

---

### Answer by username_2 on 2019-03-26. Score: 3

Please refer to [Old Chinese reconstructions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstructions_of_Old_Chinese) when analysing phonetic components of characters.

他 - Baxter-Sagart OC: **/\*l̥ˤaj/** > [MC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Chinese): **/tʰɑ/** > Mandarin Pinyin: **tā**

也 - Baxter-Sagart OC: **/\*lAjʔ/** > MC: **/jiaX/** > Mandarin Pinyin: **yě**

> 有部首旁的汉字的发音通常按照没有部首旁的字。

You should probably learn that 部首 is a dictionary indexing tool, and has nothing to do with the functions of character components.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: indeed. I was just taking a swing at it. No idea whatsoever how to say the generic form of 人旁的《字》、心旁的《字》 等, nor am I actually certain that there IS a way to say it. Also, look at that: the two characters WERE the same up until middle Chinese!  (note that I am guessing here, as I have no clue at all how to read those squiggly letters)  

---

### Answer by username_6 on 2019-03-26. Score: 0

> 有部首旁的汉字的发音通常按照没有部首旁的字

well, this assumption is **incorrect**

an example:

潢．熿．獚．璜．磺．穔．簧．蟥．趪．鷬 and 黃, all share the same pronunciation wong4

[http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf/search.php?word=黃](http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf/search.php?word=%E9%BB%83)

so, what about

# 黌

it has the component 黃 in the bottom part. unfortunately, this one is pronounce as hung4

[http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf/search.php?word=黌](http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf/search.php?word=%E9%BB%8C)

the moral is: don't assume the pronunciation of any chinese character.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Wait. You just proved my point. "wong" and "hong" are the same in many dialects. But "ta" and "ye" are most definitely not.  

---

### Answer by username_7 on 2019-03-26. Score: -2

Words "come" and "become" pronounce similarly. So you think "也" and "他" should also make like this way, right?

This is no Chinese thinking mind, if you study more, you will see lots of similar samples, even "己" and "已" are different on pronunciation and meaning also.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Incorrect. 已 and 己 are *completely different characters* that just happen to look somewhat the same when converted to 正楷. 他 and 也 are in fact *the same* character (at least the phonetic part). There's more going on here, I guarantee you.  
> **username_0**: The "phonetic portion" method is very much a part of how Chinese characters work, and has been in place since the Zhou dynasty. You are SUPPOSED to be able to rely on the non-radical portion to guess pronunciation.  
> **username_7**: hi @username_0 , I think you follow a thinking mind that the character seems like similar so the pronunciation also should be similar. That is why I say so. Or I can provide another example, like 环 and 不  
> **username_0**: ummmmm...you DO know that 环 is really 環 , which IS pronunced somewhat like 睘 . Not incredibly close, but not nealy as far as huan and qiong  
> **username_0**: and yes, I AM saying PRECISELY that  
> **username_7**: Hahaha, emm....well, your have a good Chinese level, keep going, I admire you, I am learning Spanish at the moment, hope as good as you in Chinese  

---

