Hanzi of the day! 舞 and 無

Hello everyone! After some hiatus, I decided I should be more serious about blogging. After all, every blog written is one character learned! Which means that I just need to write about 4986 more blog posts before I can finally read a bloody book in Chinese without consulting a dictionary on every sentence, but I digress... Today we are going to talk about Dancing. And nothingness.

舞 wǔ means to dance and is a rather complicated looking hanzi that is taught in beginner level Chinese. The character has a ritualistic origin: A person holding ox tails (or feathers), performing a rain dance! (A bit more obvious in the historical forms of the character shown below.)

Now, nothing surprising so far, until I came across the phrase 無情 as I was reading some beginner books. I am thinking now, I know 舞 is dance and 情 is feeling, so this must be someone really happy or gracious. I check it in the dictionary just in case, and I was very surprised to see it meant heartless. WHAT?!?

Well, it turns out that 無 wǔ, while visually very similar to 舞, is actually a completely different character with distinct meaning: the absense of something, nothingness, sort of similar to the English prefix un-.

Historically 無 did indeed mean to dance, but that form was borrowed stolen to mean negation, as this word is more common. And thus, there was no character left to dance!

What's the solution? Slap a pair of legs 舛 under 無 to form 舞 and call it a day!

That's it from me, have a nice week!

Nick