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Apologies if my question is too similar to the one in Why is the radical of 难 > 隹 and not 又? The link in there is broken unfortunately and I am unable to find the source.

This character for difficult, 难/難 is traditionally comprising of phonetic /堇, and the 隹 semantic which is a bird. However, it seems like there is also semantic explanation for the /堇 component, which closely resembles 黃, being a man with difficulty breathing/hyperinflated lungs in the middle part and a wheezing mouth being the top part that looks like 廿. This also makes sense for other “difficult” related words with /堇 phonetic, like 嘆 and 艱, which coincidentally all have been simplified to 又.

Thus, my question is: did 难/難 use to be a type of bird? What kind of bird was it, and when did it start replacing as loan?

dROOOze
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Fishuman
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  • "" 是 "漢" 字的右半边，"漢"和"難"的声母都是 an，我感觉""是表声音的部分。 – Zhang Dec 07 '20 at 01:27

1 Answers1

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I'm going to give a simple answer first - I'm sure better more complete answers will come to follow.

Outlier

FORM
難 nán (also nàn) is composed of 堇 jiān and 隹 “bird,” which hints at the original meaning “type of bird.” 堇 gives the sound.

COMPONENTS
堇
In 難 nán (also nàn), 堇 jiān is a sound component, though this is not obvious in modern Mandarin.
隹
In 難, 隹 “bird” is a meaning component, hinting at the original meaning “type of bird.”

MEANINGS
nán

1 (orig.) name of a type of bird
2 ○ difficult
3 → trouble; adversity

nàn
1 (orig.) name of a type of bird
2 ○ difficult
3 → disaster; catastrophe

There's also a variant character: (⿰鳥, if it doesn't display with you) which quite explicitly shows it's avian connection.

Outlier's reference comes from p. 307 & 308 of 季旭昇's《說文新證》- this is where we will see the connection between the variant and 難:

enter image description here enter image description here

Here the ○ icon in Outlier's definition is an indicator of a phonetic loan. So, basically it is just a:

character that is "borrowed" to write another homophonous or near-homophonous morpheme

and this is confirmed by《說文新證》's:

假借

explanation.

  • 隹 replaces ---> 鳥

  • 堇 was seemingly always there giving the character its sound

"⿰x" being replaced by "⿰又x" is a separate question but it's not totally uncommon, think: 艱 → 艰.

Mou某
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  • Thanks for answering the bird part being borrowed. What about the 堇 or part? Were these 2 characters effectively the same? – Fishuman Dec 10 '20 at 03:42
  • I don't know if those two characters were used as loans of each other, but they were each originally made to represent different things. For , please see this Quora post. As for 堇, I think it originally meant clay, consisting of semantic 土 and phonetic . Since is phonetic in 堇, it seems reasonable for variants of 難 to use and 堇 as phonetic components. – wang_xiao_ming Dec 11 '20 at 20:33
  • And while 難 originally referred to some kind of bird, it may not be a coincidence that 難 was later borrowed to mean difficult or hardship, given its semantic similarity with (i.e. 難 may have been deliberately picked as a loan to mean difficult since it contains ), but hopefully someone else who is more informed can provide some insight on this point. – wang_xiao_ming Dec 11 '20 at 20:38