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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 "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'' "flea" for ''zǎo'' "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 (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").

Examples

original meaning	pictograph	pinyin	loaned meaning	new character	pinyin
four	四	sì	nostrils	泗 (mucous; sniffle)	sì
flat, thin	枼	yè	leaf	葉	yè
north	北	běi	back (of the body)	背	bèi
to want	要	yāo	waist	腰	yāo
few	少	shǎo	sand	沙 and 砂	shā
forever	永	yǒng	swim	泳	yǒng

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

Contents

See also

References

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.