Hanzi of the day! 取

Hey everybody! Today, as the world is reopening, most of us are going to roam through the mythical battlefields known as outside world in order to pursue arbitrary quests called life goals.
This is the purrfect opportunity to go through history in order to look at the curious case of the character .

is an ideogrammic compound character that means to take. It is formed of the character for ear on the left and the character for again on the right. This makes no sense, right?

Wrong

For starters, the character is a snake that wiggled and changed its meaning. It used to represent the right hand. In ancient times there was a practise to cut and collect the ears of dead enemy soldiers on the battlefield in order to later show them as evidence for a kill. So the actual meaning of is a right hand taking someone's ear away.

It was also much more practical than carrying those heavy cumbersome skulls everywhere...

Now that we have solved this mystery, let's look at the curiously related character for marriage. When a man marries a woman, that is , literally to take a woman .

This is not be confused for the word for a woman marrying a man, which is, obviously , or a woman finding a house . The traidition in ancient times dictated that the woman goes to the groom's house when married.

I wonder if the character for showing affection to children also contains 取...

That's it from me. Enjoy life, guys!

Nick

Image sources: pixabay pexels pixabay