Image:U5973-radical-38 early-form.svg

[edit] Summary

A slightly schematized version of an early form of the Chinese character which is U5973 in the Unicode character set encoding standard (i.e. Radical 38 or the basic "woman" character 女, modern Mandarin pronunciation nǚ). Selectively takes certain details from different early attestations in order to bring out the basic quasi-pictographic nature of the character (depicting a kneeling woman), rather than being a precise copy of any one particular early attestation.

Based on the following sources:

• Grammata Serica: Script and Phonetics in Chinese and Sino-Japanese by Bernhard Karlgren (first published 1940), page 150 (sign group 94).
• The Etymologies of 3000 Chinese Characters in Common Usage, by Chang Hsüan (Zhang Xuan) (1968), page 200.
• Online website http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterASP/CharacterEtymology.aspx?characterInput=%E5%A5%B3&submitButton1=Etymology (Richard Sears)

For particular early attested forms at Wikimedia Commons, see Image:女-oracle.svg , Image:女-bronze.svg , and Image:女-oracle.gif . For another somewhat similar image, see en:Image:Character Nuu Oracle.png .

The exact visual symbolism of the upper half of this early "woman" character has been debated; probably it depicts her with her hands folded (or held close together, attending to some task), while the two small enclosed areas were also meant to suggest her breasts (as seen from the fact that the early form of the "mother" character U6BCD 母 was based on the "woman" character with two dots added there).

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