我

A pictogram (象形) of a trident-like weapon or tool (note the oracle bone script form 𢦐). Jao & Zeng (1985, pp. 289–290) conjecture about its similarity to a kind of three-bladed polearm found at archaeological sites. Cf. 戈 (“polearm”), which is the same weapon but with a single blade instead of three. It was already borrowed for sound as an instance of jiajie (假借) for the pronoun 我 (OC *ŋaːlʔ, “I”) since the oracle bone script.

Guo Moruo considers it to be the original character for 錡 (OC *ɡral, “a kind of war axe with three blades or teeth”).

Folk etymology considers it to be an ideograph of a hand (手) holding a weapon (戈) to protect oneself.

From Proto-Sino-Tibetan *ŋa. Cognate with 吾 (OC *ŋaː), Burmese ငါ (nga, “I”), Hakka 𠊎 (ngài). The expected Mandarin pronunciation is ě (now only found in a few Northern dialects); wǒ is "a col[loquial] archaism" (Schuessler, 2007).

Schuessler further decomposes 我 *ŋâiʔ (his reconstruction) into *ŋa + *i, which he terms an "independent suffix" which also appears in some Tibeto-Burman cognates of this pronoun. DeLancey and Benedict believe that the *-i here was an "information structure marker". But given how Sagart believes 我 was originally plural (Sagart 1999:142) and DeLancey discovered that first-person plural compounds of *ŋa (“I”) and *i (“we”) exist in e.g. Raji and Stau, it is also possible that the -iʔ element is actually *i (“we”) fused onto the singular.