Jiajie

In Written Chinese, jiajie (假借 "borrow; make use of") is the practice of using the character for one word to write another homophonous or near-homophonous word. When a character is used this way, it is called a jiajiezi (假借字 "borrowed character"), or phonetic loan character.

The term jiajie dates back to the Han Dynasty list of six categories in Chinese character classification. The related term tongjia (通假 pinyin:tōngjiǎ "interchangeable borrowing") apparently first occurred in the Ming Dynasty. These two terms are commonly used as synonyms, despite the Chinese linguistic distinction between jiajiezi specifying a character loan of another word that did not originally have a character, e.g., using 東 "a bag tied at both ends" for dōng "east", and tongjia specifying a character loan between two words that both have characters, e.g., using zǎo 蚤 "flea" for zǎo 早 "early", where 早 is the benzi (本字 "original character"). The practice of tongjia creates one of the most notorious diffculties for reading ancient Chinese texts, particularly the pre-Qin ones.

The first Chinese characters were pictograms, such as 龜 (guī), depicting a turtle. But abstract meanings and grammatic particles cannot be expressed in pictograms. Instead, in the second phase of development, as in Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian scripts, characters were used phonetically to express the more abstract meanings. That means some characters could stand for more than one word at the same time. In some cases, to avoid ambiguities, the etymological meaning of the character would be dropped, and a second character would be created for that. In the new character, the original graph would usually serve as the shengfu (聲符 "phonetic sign") while the meaning would be indicated by an additional yifu (意符/義符 "semantic sign"). Such a process of disambiguation is the source of the xingshengzi (形聲字 "semantic-phonetic characters").

Note that the origins of many Chinese characters are debated, and there are very likely to be different etymologies in other works.

See also

• ateji in Japanese where Chinese characters, or kanji, are used mainly phonetically
• transliteration into Chinese characters where Chinese characters are used mainly phonetically

References

• Qiu Xigui, trans. Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman (2000). Chinese Writing. Early China Special Monograph Series No. 4. Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-071-7.
• Wang Hongyuan (1993). The Origins of Chinese characters. Beijing: Sinolingua. ISBN 978-7-80052-243-7.ja:仮借