Hate evil
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For those who do not read Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese, this will give you a taste:
惡惡（恶恶）
Forgive me for not telling you right away how to read these characters. In truth, they are many different ways to pronounce them, and they all mean something different. I will only go fairly deeply into two of the different readings and will just touch upon the others.
The first pair of characters are identical traditional forms of the same graph, the second pair are identical simplified forms of the same graph.
The strokes of the simplified form of the graph are easy to count (10), but those of the traditional form are beastly difficult to count accurately (different people count them different ways, but the standard total is supposedly 12 — go figure).
The four dots at the bottom of the character constitute the heart radical / semantophore, indicating that it has something to do with feelings / emotions, while the residual strokes at the top amount to the phonophore, giving a rough approximation of its sound.
Whether traditional or simplified, at least six different etymologies apply to this character, and it has at least six different pronunciations in MSM, some of which are contested: è, wù, wū, ě, hū, yà. I will merely discuss the meanings of the first two pronunciations: è ("evil"; "wicked"; "foul"; "fierce"; "hostile"; "ferocious") and wù ("hate"; "loathe"; "dislike").
How shall we read the disyllabic term / expression / phrase 惡惡? What does it mean? If you encountered it in the wild, you wouldn't know how to pronounce it or what it means.
惡惡 is actually a fixed expression in many classical texts dating back to two thousand and more years ago. It's from those ancient (con)texts and the heritage of feeling and thought they passed down to you through the ages that you know 惡惡 is pronounced wùè and means "hate evil" — verb noun.
Still, confusion reigns. 惡惡（恶恶）does appear in zdic, the most widely used and reputable online dictionary of Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese. In fact, 惡惡 occurs twice, both times with the same meaning, "zēnghèn xié'è 憎恨邪恶" ["hate evil"]), but with contrary pronunciations: "èwù" and "wùè".
You have to be learned to read this sort of thing.
Selected readings
- "Translating from Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic to Mandarin" (1/14/24)
- "Hype over AI and Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic" (11/9/23) — with lengthy bibliography
- "Why Literary Sinitic is so darn hard" (5/30/19)
Philip Taylor said,
November 21, 2024 @ 6:56 am
"The first pair of characters are identical traditional forms of the same graph, the second pair are identical simplified forms of the same graph" — May I ask whether there is a substantial body of Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic literature written in simplified script ? I ask because it was my impression that the adoption of the simplified script post-dated the era of Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic composition by a considerable period of time. But this not being a field in which I have any expertise whatsoever, I may well be completely wrong.
Chris Button said,
November 21, 2024 @ 9:18 am
In addition to 惡 and 恶, there is also the Japanese form 悪.
As an aside, I've always liked the 亞 component since its earliest form is the blueprint of a tomb.
Jonathan Silk said,
November 21, 2024 @ 1:58 pm
What’s the problem with 12? That’s how I count it, don’t you?
Jonathan Smith said,
November 21, 2024 @ 4:17 pm
Re: "惡惡", if you write morphemes and have fewer characters than morphemes, which you do, so it goes:
nichiyōbi 日曜日 / hū-jîn-lâng 婦人人 / um… dǎ dī shì díquè de mùdi 打的是的確的目的 'taking a cab is the actual goal' or sth.
So you don't have to "be learned" per se so much as know the language you're reading.
Re: writing 凸 or 亞 or whatever, point is that such forms are unusual in Chinese characters and the prescriptive procedures for composing them are particularly non-obvious… e.g., if the interwebs are to be believed, Japanese vs. Chinese pedagogues approach "凸" totally differently. For my part I aspire at some point to skip directly from "shitty handwriting, no clue re: rules" to "artistic handwriting, can disregard rules."
Chris Button said,
November 21, 2024 @ 5:18 pm
Same for me. But I did have to write it in the air a few times to be sure.
But to be fair, only è and wù are worth noting for most practical purposes. And if you look at their Old Chinese forms, è goes back to Ɂăk and wù goes back to Ɂăks. So the only difference is the -s, which triggered changes that pulled the pronunciations apart.
Josh R. said,
November 21, 2024 @ 7:01 pm
For those interested/perplexed (as I was) at the count of 12 strokes, this site shows how it would be written.
https://kaku-navi.com/kanji/kanji04834.html
I must confess, even with over 30 years experience with hanzi/kanji, that particular stroke order was not at all intuitive.
Jonathan silk said,
November 22, 2024 @ 2:11 am
@josh R.
I don’t know why, but that stroke order is exactly how I wrote it (yes, in the air; sometimes I do it on my palm).
Of course, I should stress, I’m sure I’m often wrong in stroke counts, so as they say with investing, present performance is no guarantee of future success!
Jerry Packard said,
November 23, 2024 @ 10:31 am
I would venture that the third tone in 惡心 e3xin1 ‘to be nauseous/female morning sickness’ is also a very common use of 惡, not quite as common as 惡梦 etc. (e4meng4 ‘nightmare’) but almost.
Chris Button said,
November 23, 2024 @ 2:39 pm
@ Jerry Packard
At least from a historical perspective, we can include it under Ɂăk with ě instead of è presumably being onomatopoeic as 噁?
EHeino said,
November 25, 2024 @ 2:17 pm
As a total tangent, I know from genealogical research that one of my ancestors was a Puritan named "Hatevil Nutter" (with the first name pronounced "hate evil"). A good example of nominative determinism (he was so dedicated to finding sin in others that he was notorious for his cruelty and excessive judgment toward others).