Page 18 - EALC C306/505

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There are different types of 破音字. To give one example of a distinct type (noted
in the exercise vocabulary), called “loan characters (jǐajìezì 假借字),” 女 [nǚ / rǔ]
probably originally meant “woman” (which its graph seems to indicate), but was
“loaned” for a near homonym (in Old Chinese), the pronoun “you,” which was a concept
difficult to represent in graphic form. Thus, although these words originally shared the
same graph (女), nǚ and rǔ were etymologically unrelated words that just happened
approximately to share a phonetic value – they are reconstructed as *nraʔ and *naʔ,
respectively (ʔ is a glottal stop in the back of the throat, like the stop between the two
syllables in uh-oh). This near homophony generally made it obvious to readers which of
these two words was intended when they saw the graph 女 in context. But perhaps
because there were enough occasions when, in fact, the character did not resolve easily
which word was meant, the word rǔ (meaning “you”) later came to be represented by
another graph (汝), which was originally the name of a river. When the character 女
functions as a 破音字 to meaning “you” we call it a “loan graph.”