她 is “she”. The 女 part of the character means “woman”. It is a pictograph of a woman holding a child. As if all women can have children. It’s sexist and transphobic. I could go on, but suffice it to say that the entire hanzi system of characters has this shit baked into it and none of it will ever go away without outside action. Mao tried but couldn’t get it done.
You’re confusing 她 with 好, which is where the whole “woman holding a child” etymology comes from. 也 isn’t a child. In modern Chinese, it means “also” while in classical Chinese, it’s used as an emphatic final particle like modern Japanese よ. The radical for child is 子, as you can see in the oracle bone script which looks like a pictogram of a child raising their arms.
Both versions of 他 and 她 are phono-semantic characters like the vast majority of Chinese characters, where one radical denotes phonetic meaning while another radical denotes semantic meaning. In this case, 也 is the phonetic radical. It doesn’t make sense in Mandarin (you’re comparing ta1 vs ye3), but in old Chinese, 他 and 也 were a lot similar in pronunciation.
女 doesn’t have anything related to children going by the oracle bone script either. Neither does 母, which means mother in modern Chinese.
Mao tried but couldn’t get it done.
Because it was an absolutely terrible idea that almost no one else other than weirdos who stan the Gang of 4 too hard during the Cultural Revolution would agree with. And it’s quite convenient that “reactionary” hanzi has to be discarded for the “progressive” script used by imperialists that sacked the Old Summer Palace during the Century of Humiliation.
You literally just need to replace the problematic characters with new characters. Like, you don’t have to ditch the entire system. What kind of ultra nonsense is that?
Absolutely wild that white libs will propose in the guize of being “leftist”
Like eliminating an entire language is cultural genocide not inclusiveness.
And the English word “woman” comes from the social role of “wife”. Should we discard that as sexist as well? How many people actually look at 女 and think “that’s a mother, and cannot refer to trans women.”?
probably some? i’ve seen 1-2 people unironically suggest we stop using the word “robot” because it’s etymology has something to do with slavery,
In Chinese robot combat (like King of Bots and This is Fighting Robots) they are sometimes called 机器人 which is robot (machine-person) and sometimes 铁甲, or Iron Armor. I think that’s pretty dope but maybe it’s also problematic.
The (lamentable) fact that Mao’s writing system reform failed is probably evidence enough that hanzi is unlikely to be abandoned in our lifetimes.
For digital communication at least, you can convert hanzi to pinyin and back very easily, that’s what I do when I don’t just need ASAP machine translation…
