What’s the difference?

Maybe i will sound stupid, but sometimes i really don’t understand the kanji. Like when you take “嫉” and “妬” and even put these together “嫉妬”, translators will show the same translation as “jealous/envy”. Why i have to put jealous+jealous together to make jealous?

4 comments
  1. Because compound words are less ambiguous in speech and in writing than either individual Character would be on their own.

  2. Kanji all have their own meaning but not all kanji are words on their own. So the “longer” form is a word, the two parts just convey the meaning but can’t be used on their own (i don’t know these specific kanji, but generally it’s like this).
    “Credit card” is not one random card and not a credit. It’s a card that gives you credit.

  3. In some parts of the USA, people pronounce “pen” and “pin” the same, so they are more likely to use compounds like “ink pen” to avoid confusion.

    In the same way, Chinese has many words pronounced the same as 嫉, so making compounds like 嫉妬 is useful to avoid misunderstandings.

    Likewise, Japanese already has 5 words pronounced しつ, so it’s not surprising that they generally preferred borrowing compounds like 嫉妬 from Chinese, instead of flooding the language with single-character homophones like 嫉.

  4. you aren’t putting jealous and jealous together, that’s just the spelling for a particular synonym of jealous/envy. you never create words, they all already exist.

    and kanji don’t have meanings in the same way words do – at most they’re like greek and latin root words underlying english – sure there’s a general meaning but you can’t use them in a sentence.

    as to why the etymology of the word is that way, there’s no way to know who first coined most words or why they picked one letter over another, that kind of information is lost to time. but it’s surely not terribly confusing that two roots for jealousy correlate in some way to more jealousy, no?

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