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Q: Why is the character for mother (妈）a woman and a horse?
They carried babies on their backs?
12 years 9 weeks ago in Teaching & Learning - China
Because horse is pronounced similarly. Like 未 and 味. No semantic significance.
Same reason family (家) is a pig in a house and smile (笑) is death by bamboo. To allow me to draw lots of little cartoons to help me learn Chinese characters. The village I live in is luxu (芦墟) a little piece of grass on a corpse in the land that a tiger does his business.
we Chinese made characters always by two parts
one for its meaning (woman) one for its sound (horse)because 'horse' in Chinese we pronounce it very similar with 'mother'
so we can learn chinese characters easily
if u have any problem in Chinese u can contact me whenever, I ran an english training school in a small town, i have much time for answer u my email:mc225826@163.com
Real kinky stuff, like two dogs making love to a cat. That's why.
many chinese characters have a sound component and a meaning component. In this case 妈 has a meaning component 女 (nv3 - woman) and a sound component 马 (ma3 - horse). The word combines the two and is pronounced ma1, similar to horse.
Properly speaking, it isn't just 妈， but 妈妈, pronounced ma1ma.
