• urshanabi [he/they]@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    9 months ago

    I might be wrong but the 子 radical and 好 was told to me to be good by my Mandarin teacher because it's like, harmony. Like woman and person or woman and child or something. It's like good is when there's a balance and not one extreme or the other.

    • Flyberius [comrade/them]
      ·
      9 months ago

      The app hello Chinese said it's because having a wife and a child is good, lol

      I guess the original meaning is lost in 5000 years of history.

      • 🏳️‍⚧️ 新星 [they/she]@lemmygrad.ml
        ·
        9 months ago

        Yeah, it does seem to be lost. Wiktionary has a couple theories. Here’s the first one:

        The widely accepted meaning of this character is that the characters for “female” (女) and “child” (子) were put together to form a compound because it was good for a woman to have a child.