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I'm aware the two kanji are often pronounced the same, but why does one contain the other in it?

Golden Cuy
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2 Answers2

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That is called 形声. About 90% of all kanjis are created in this way. In this case, the left side 言 is responsible for the meaning, and the right side, 吾 is responsible for the pronunciation. In turn, 吾 is composed of the upper part 五, which is responsible for the pronunciation and the lower part 口, which is responsible for the meaning. Why is 五 included in 語? Because it was created so. Why is this way of creating kanji so popular? Because it will be a mess if thousands of kanjis were all pictograms, and if the pronunciation and the meaning are combined, it will be easy to both remember its meaning and the pronunciation.

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In Middle Chinese and a reconstruction of Old Chinese, 吾 and 五 have the following readings (Baxter):

五: wu3 < ngu < *nga

吾: wu2 < nguX < *ngaʔ

語: yu3 < ngjoX < *ng(r)aʔ

In modern Mandarin, 語 (yu3) and 五 (wu3) have diverged in pronunciation, but according to reconstructions they were pronounced similarly in antiquity.

There are other cases of 形声 where the phonetic does not apparently match the pronunciation -- some of these are because of this divergence.

jogloran
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    As long as you are talking about Japanese, all three characters are pronounced completely the same as "go", (and in ancient Chinese when the characters were created, they were the same as well according to you). –  Feb 16 '12 at 13:33
  • +1 i love this answer – ixtmixilix Feb 16 '12 at 14:44
  • @sawa: Even in Old Chinese they weren't the same -- like a rebus, the phonetic doesn't fully determine the pronunciation -- just more similar than in the modern language. – jogloran Feb 17 '12 at 00:49
  • @jogloran I see. That may be the case. By being the same, I was referring to the reconstructed form *[nga] in your answer. They look the same. –  Feb 17 '12 at 02:43
  • @sawa: To clarify, the '?' is part of the phonetic transcription; it's a glottal stop. – jogloran Feb 17 '12 at 04:11
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    I see. I didn't realize that part. I misinterpreted your description. I see, they are different. –  Feb 17 '12 at 04:19
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    Just wondering if it's common to use ? for glottal stop when there is already a symbol for it... Using ʔ (and hopefully noting what it means) would at least not make people think you are writing something question-related. – atlantiza Feb 17 '12 at 07:44
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    @atlantiza: Good question. SAMPA and Kirshenbaum are two common ways we use to represent a subset of the IPA in ASCII. In both of these, the question mark represents the glottal stop. Certainly I could have used Unicode. – jogloran Feb 17 '12 at 14:34
  • Coming too late, but I suspect that the Middle and Old reconstructions of 五 and 吾 are put the other way around. – broccoli forest Dec 26 '15 at 10:44