Are there any online etymological dictionaries of Mandarin (not for characters but for spoken words)

Question

tl;dr Are you aware of any dictionaries that explain word etymologies (not merely character etymologies)? Some links/references would be useful.

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This is actually a collection of related questions, but I thought it would be good to keep them together.

Are there any online etymological dictionaries of Chinese? All such dictionaries I can find deal with character etymologies, which is not at all the same thing as the etymologies of the real spoken language (which can do just fine without a writing system at all, I'm sure that not more than a 100 years ago literacy rate in China was far from great).

Generally, how well do character etyomologies reflect the true etyomologies of words?

Let me give a motivating example, which made me curious about it. Yak in Mandarin is 牦牛 / 氂牛 / máo​niú, i.e. when spoken sounds just like "hairy cow" 毛牛, a very fitting description. If it weren't for the characters, one would be tempted to suspect this is not an accident. Yet if we look up the character (not word!) online, we only get "signific cluster, an ox 牜牛 that requires couxing 攵攴 from a branch 未", which suggests otherwise.

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To avoid an all too common misunderstanding, I'd like to point out again that although a writing system can leave a deep mark on the oral language, a language can exist just fine without it. I am sure that a 100 years ago the literacy rate in China was far below great, yet people could use the language just fine. So again, when I say Chinese in this question, I mean the spoken Chinese language (take whichever variety you prefer), not the character based writing system (I have the impression that often answers about Chinese consider written Chinese first).

Answer 1

The ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese is searchable online here:

http://edoc.uchicago.edu/edoc2013/digitaledoc_index.php

Go to 'EDOC: Linear Output', select 'All' on the right-hand side (under 'ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese'), type in your characters, and click 'Display Phonetics'. For more complicated searches, go to 'EDOC: Search'.

Also, to give a simple example to help clarify what the OP is referring to as "character etymologies" vs. "word etymologies", the ABC dictionary gives the following for 蜜 (mì):

‘Honey’ [Chuci]. || [T] MTang mir < mir, ONW miit — [D] PMin *mit || [E] Thought to be borrowed from IE-Tocharian B mit ‘honey’ < PTokharian *mjət (Behr Oriens 1999 / 2000: 36).

The above is a word etymology. It is a loanword, of Indo-European origin, and is in fact related to English "mead", Lithuanian "medus", Greek "μέθη", Russian "мёд", and Farsi "می", for example.

A character etymology would decompose this character into 虫 (insect radical) and 宓 (phonetic), which is in turn decomposed into 宀 (roof radical) and 必 (phonetic). Both 虫 and 宀 can be traced back to the oracle bone script, while 必 can be traced back to the bronzeware script. (Source: hanziyuan.net)

The character and word etymologies are quite distinct - while all of the components of the character are of Chinese origin, the word itself is Indo-European.

Answer 2

It's not online, but it's worth checking out, as it actually does cover word etymologies:

ABC Etymological Dictionary

Answer 3

In terms of answering your first question about the websites. I usually use ZDIC.net or Baidu's Baike. However, Baidu Baike doesn't always give etymology. If those two fail, why not try searching for it using Baidu/Google and adding 字根 (character root), 本意 (original meaning) or 名源 (origin of names/etymology) to your search.

Although it might be hard to get word etymology, like Xah Lee, that Classical Chinese were mostly one-character words. For instance, 牦牛 can said with just 牦。Thus, it might be more productive to go after character etymologies, rather than words.

Trying to answer your 牦牛 question. My Chinese is not good enough to understand all the dictionary speak, but looking at the traditional character version of 氂 on zdic.net should be of some guidance.

In linking that, there might be some hints as to where it originated. Another version of the traditional character is also 犛, which refers to a black ox/yak. See the radical difference underneath？毛 vs 牛。 In fact, the traditional character, according the above zdic link in the 说文解字 section, says that the tail of the 犛牛 was called 氂. However, it further states that 㲠, which is an abbreviated version of 氂，which seems have fallen out of use, means "horse tail, long hair; thick hair". The old banners/flags had yak's tails on them. This was called 旄. In fact another meaning for 旄 is also a yak's tail. Thus, 旄 and 氂 became intertwined. 犛牛 became 旄牛.

Now here my Chinese gets a bit a dodgy. In Classical Chinese too:

从犛省。从毛。莫交切。二部。按周禮樂師音義。氂舊音毛。但許不言毛亦聲。而左傳晏氂，外傳作晏萊。後漢書魏郡輿人歌。岑熙狗吠不驚。足下生氂。與災時茲三字韵。則是犛省亦聲。在弟一部也。

As far as I can gather, what happened was that, people started calling 犛牛， 氂牛，but they wanted to stop this, due to its similar sound to 毛，but this came too late.

If anyone with better understanding of Classical Chinese, can also verify the 说文解字 entry on the ZDIC link. Heck, I had fun researching this. Got to love the depth of Chinese!

Answer 4

Chinese language doesn't work the way you might thought.

Basically, there's no such thing as etymology of words, only characters, because each char is a word. Only in last century, vernacular Chinese popularized in using 2 or more chars to denote a word. The 2-char words of vernacular chinese naturally came from the single char words and usage patterns. So, if you want to learn the history of words, basically you learn the classical chinese.

You might check out History of the Chinese language, in particular Classical Chinese.

There are lots of books on history of idioms though (e.g. Chengyu), but that's a bit different from what you mean by word.

As an analogy, let's say one might be wondering if there's a book on history of english phrases such as "fried chicken", "icy cold", "flaming hot", "black desk", "round table"...

Answer 5

Wiktionary has etymologies for many of their entries. For example:

• 蜜: "Possibly from Proto-Tocharian *ḿətə, from Proto-Indo-European *médʰu (“mead”). Compare Tocharian B mit (“honey”)."
• 玻璃: "Borrowed from Pali phalika (“crystal”), from Sanskrit स्फटिक (sphaṭika). Cognate with Thai ผลึก (pà-lʉ̀k, “crystal”), Lao ຜະລຶກ (pha lưk), ຜະລິກະ (pha li ka), Khmer ផលិក (phɑlɨk). The definition of "gay person" is derived from BL."
• 鳳凰: "Miyake (2015) reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciation *N-prəm-s ɢʷˁɑŋ and proposed, though with uncertainty, that the fabulous bird's name is the affixed form of 風皇 (“wind sovereign”)."

Answer 6

If we take away the characters, which means we are going a long way back, prior to written records, which in terms of world history is a long time ago because Chinese writing is considerably early history (think 甲骨文). We are left with the spoken language.

In terms of a spoken language Chinese is different because it doesn't have an alphabet per se, so unlinke English where you have the opportunity to have an endless number of words Chinese uses a finite number of words. For English it could be possible to trace a word like Trampoline back through its roots where you get to a certain point where it first began arising. But with Chinese if you take a word like máo​ you are in trouble because it didn't stem from any other word or in any other culture or from any other root of a word or from any part of another word, máo​ is just máo​.

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To go back to your question:

Generally, how well do character etyomologies reflect the true etymologies of words?

Looking at the example provided "an ox 牜牛 that requires couxing 攵攴 from a branch 未" at some point someone or some group decided to choose that character to apply to that "word" so understand that the character has a meaning which is what you provided above, but the word already had a meaning and a context, so you can't use the meaning of the character as a basis for the etymology or origin of the usage of the word.

This doesn't confirm or contradict that 牦牛 comes from 毛牛 as you have insinuated. The etymology of the character is useless in telling that. If you strip away the characters a 牦牛 is still a 牦牛 and will have been called such for thousands of years even if some monk decides to use a more complicated character or decides a new character is required because there may have been some other context.

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Was máo​ chosen as the spoken word for 氂 because it was hairy (毛 máo​)? You can't use the characters to answer that because both máo​ (氂) and máo​ (毛) existed prior to either character. You need to go back to a time when words first started arising and the language was born and that information is lost to the ages.

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If you want to go into the above further I'm afraid that's off topic as per the FAQ for the site as the scope is too large and you would require a book to cover all of the necessary information. I hope the above is sufficient in answering why such a tool does not exist.