血
- Ideogrammatic compound 會意
- HSK 3
- TOCFL 5
- radical 血
- 6 strokes
Etymology graph
- inherited
- borrowed
- derived
- parts
- meaning component
- sound component
- related
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Origin
Ideogrammic compound (會意 /会意): 一 (“drop of blood”) + 皿 (“container”) - a drop of blood inside a chalice for sacrificial uses. In the oracle bone script, the character was used to refer to killing animals to obtain blood to sacrifice to ancestors:
From Proto-Sino-Tibetan *s-hjwəj-t (“blood”) (STEDT; Schuessler, 2007).
Baxter and Sagart (2014) reconstruct the Old Chinese as *m̥ˤik to account for word-family connections with 脈 (OC *C.mˤ[i]k, “vein”), 衊 (OC *mˤi[k], “defiled blood”) as well as its use as a phonetic component in 侐 (OC *m̥(r)ik, “still; quiet”), which is in the same word family as 宓 (OC *mi[k], “quiet; silent”) (Sagart, 1999b; Baxter and Sagart, 2017). Sagart (1999b) argues that this word is not genetically related to the Tibeto-Burman form with *s-hjw-, but that this word has been borrowed into Tibeto-Burman.
Schuessler (2019) critiques Sagart (1999b)'s proposal that Tibeto-Burman languages all over Southeast Asia and the Himalayas in early dynastic time would and could borrow Chinese words, and Baxter and Sagart (2014)'s reconstruction 血 (OC *m̥ˤik) as resulting from "phonetic over-interpretation of graphs" and confusing etymological link with mental association between "blood" and "vein".
From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Lineage
- inheritedProto-Sino-Tibetan*s-hjwəj-t “blood”
- ideaChinese一 “one”
- ideaChinese皿 “dish; vessel”
How 血 was written 字形演變
- Oracle bone甲骨文Shang, c. 1250–1050 BCE
- Chu slips & silk楚系簡帛Warring States
- Qin slips秦系簡牘Qin
- Small seal說文小篆Shuowen, c. 100 CE
- Regular楷書since c. 200 CE
Historical forms collected by the legacy etymfun dataset; most characters have several attested variants.
Sources
- Historical glyph forms (zdic.net 字形演变) — Rights unverified
- HSK / TOCFL word lists — Facts (levels)
- 教育部《國語辭典簡編本》 (Taiwan MOE) — CC BY-ND 3.0 TW
- 說文解字 Shuowen Jiezi (Xu Shen, c. 100 CE) — Public domain
- Wiktionary (via Wiktextract / kaikki.org) — CC BY-SA 4.0
- Wiktionary: 血