天

Oracle bone script: a frontal standing man (大) with four head variants:

* Square or round block.

* Square or round block with an elongated neck and a horizontal line.

* Two equal horizontal lines.

* Two unequal horizontal lines, resembling 上.

Chen (2019) analyzes these as either an ideogrammic compound (大 + 上) or a phono-semantic compound (phono-semantic compound (形聲 /形声, *l̥ˤiŋ): semantic 大 + phonetic 丁 (*tˤeŋ)).

This character was previously reconstructed to have a /*tʰ/-initial in Old Chinese, but this hypothesis has been largely discounted in recent reconstructions, in light of evidence from early Chinese accounts of dialectal pronunciations, transcription of other languages, as well as cognate/derived characters within Chinese, which has all pointed to a voiceless resonant initial /*l̥-/ in Old Chinese. According to chapter 1 of Shiming, by c. 200 CE, this initial had already produced dialectal variation in the pronunciation: People in central-western China pronounced it with the back of the tongue, like 顯 (MC xenX), while people in eastern China pronounced it with the tip of the tongue, like 坦 (MC thanX). An old northwestern dialect variant survives as 祆 (MC xen, “God of the Zoroastrians”), and the word 天竺 (MC then trjuwk, “India”) was used to transcribe Old Persian *Hind-uka ("India").

Further etymology is unknown. During the time when this term was reconstructed with a /*tʰ-/ initial, it was frequently compared with tengri, the name for God in early Turkic and Mongolic peoples' languages. This now appears unlikely. The only certain external cognate is the Central Bai (a language closely related to Chinese) word heinl (“sky, heaven”) /xẽ⁵⁵/. Chen (1998) proposes cognation with 祁連 (OC *g'ieg-lian) and 赫連 (OC *khak-lian), transcriptions of a Xiongnu word for "sky", which he also relates to 昊天 (OC *g'ôg-hlin).