Hanzi of the day! 聞

Hello Everybody!

Today I chanced upon a very curious character 聞 and I would like you to all hear about it!

聞 wén consists of an ear 耳 inside of a door 門. Surely the meaning of this character has something to do with using the ears. I know a corresponding character that is a mouth inside a door 問, which means to ask a question. Using the same logic, 聞 should mean to hear. Yes! Well, almost. It means to smell.

My reaction when learning this hanzi

I immediately started investigating! There must be a reason for this:

The meaning in classical Chinese was indeed to hear, so it is one of those hanzi that changed its meaning through the ages.
In modern Chinese it still maintains the hear meaning in some words, such as:
- 新聞 news, literally translating as new hearing (I guess new smells nowadays).
- 聞名 famous, literally, a name that is heard (I guess smelled)
- The idiom 聞所未聞 unheard of.
- The 聞風喪膽 to be terror striken at the sound of the news. Lol, we all feel that one.
- Many, many other idioms.
The meaning in modern Japanese is indeed still to hear.
The oracle bone script and bronze scripts also depict it is as hearing:

A man who is covering his mouth and craning their ears to listen.

So where does the meaning of to smell come from?

There are some vague notions that smelling and hearing are close to each other as they are both senses so the meaning could jump around. Some languages often group senses together as words that share same root, or polysemantic words. This is indeed the case with some Austronesian or Tibeto-Burman languages, and maybe that's what happened in Chinese?

Or it could be phonetic changes or influence from Mon-Khmer languages?

In the end of the day nobody really knows.

Or maybe they were predicting what news The Rock would bring up. That's my favourite explanation at the very least.

Have a nice day!

Nick(y)

Image sources: personal uknonwn renlu tenor