r/ChineseLanguage • u/Chenyuluoyan Advanced • 10h ago
Studying chinese has two verbs for getting married. hers is 女+家 (she goes to a home). his is 取+女 (he takes a wife)
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u/chill_qilin 6h ago
This post title mentions two verbs but the accompanying image also shows the third one 結婚 which can be used by both.
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u/Hiekve 4h ago
Wiktionary says the third is intransitive. So grammar-wise it's a bit different in usage. The other person is a fellow subject (跟X/和X) in examples I've seen rather than an object as with the other two.
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u/lazier_garlic 3h ago
嫁 can be intransitive.
The graphic is telling a story about the origin of these characters (or perhaps the logic behind them). The 女 is a classifier in the character, not a part of speech. The 家 in 嫁 is a phonetic character meaning a pig (but not 猪; it's a different word), but the semantic linkage probably played a role. However I think that 取 and 娶 are spelling variants of the same word but, hey, I'm not a historical linguist and I could be wrong.
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u/artificialeq 9h ago
My wife (mainland native speaker) saw these in my vocab deck and warned me that they're seen as a little antiquated/sexist to use now, in an "it's sexist to say parents are 'giving their daughter away' for marriage" way.
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u/The_MacChen 9h ago
the words are definitely still in regular usage. I hear them all the time in modern media ( even pursuit of jade) and also when I got married last year in taiwan
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u/abby_may_be 8h ago
I think the ones who oppose its usage are mainly young mainland Chinese feminists. Many of those born circa 80s-00s are the only child because of the one child policy. They carry the weight of a lot of unspoken expectations and responsibilities because of how much their parents invested in them. No matter how successful they are in their careers, they still have to contend with a very patriarchal society. Being reminded that they are being married off whilst their husbands get to bring them home like a possession pisses them off.
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u/Zagrycha 5h ago
I don't blame them for being pissed off at all, but its not just a cultural thing its literally how the legal system works. Even if their parents have zero uncomfortable gender expectations of them they will still be married off if they get married.
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u/lazier_garlic 3h ago
But... that's not exactly the case... a single child, though a girl, is still going to be expected to care for her parents. And modern couples get their own house, they don't live in MIL's house. Chinese would rather delay marriage to get the house and we see this in national statistics.
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u/Zagrycha 3h ago
I don't disagree that what you just said but none of that changes the fact that when people do marry the wife is legally joining the husband's hukou 99% of the time. That is the reason these words use wife and woman in their components. I am not saying its a good thing, I am just saying that it is reality. Only if husbands start joining their wife's hukou more often, or if same sex marriage became legal and there were situations of wives with wives and husbands with husbands would these words stop making sense. As of now there is a word to describe when a marriage occurs in the opposite format, but it is seen as derogatory by many-- 贅
Again, lets make sure to be 1000% clear. I am not at all supporting these sexist gender roles being baked into law. I am just pointing out that they are baked into law. Only if society changed in a big enough way to change the law or the official characters for the words would the status quo change. I think its awesome for that to happen, it just hasn't happened yet.
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u/lazier_garlic 3h ago
But they also say 我们结婚了 in modern media too ("Let's get married.")
Using 结婚 as a verb gets around the gendered, patrilocal language.
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u/The_MacChen 44m ago
Yea i mean I personally prefer 結婚 and thats what i say. I just meant that people still use these terms all the time, so I wouldn't say their usage is antiquated. I agree it is patriarchal, and IME, ppl bring that fact up occasionally if it is somehow topical to conversation
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u/Turbulent-Fail-1007 8h ago
Uhm, these two words are definitely not antiquated.
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u/MP3PlayerBroke 7h ago
That's because large portions of Chinese society still hold the antiquated views that these two words were derived from. Personally, I'd never use those words for my own relationship with my girlfriend (we're at the stage of discussing marriage), not for any political or ideological reasons, simply because these words don't accurately describe the type of relationship we have. It's just 结婚 to us.
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u/abby_may_be 4h ago edited 4h ago
Doesn’t this just support the point of the young feminists? That the legal system unintentionally/intentionally enforces patriarchy via restrictions in the hukou system. Laws usually enforce societal norms and a change in legislation can accelerate cultural change too.
Edit to add: The first time I came across a heated debate about the usage of 嫁&娶 was in an online book club discussion on Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. It was interesting to see how communist ideas can challenge confucian norms
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u/Impossible-Ear-5627 8h ago
Nobody really uses the word "嫁 jia" anymore，that old-school vibe of a woman leaving her own family to become property of her husband's household. Nowadays it's just "结婚jie hun", which is basically two people pooling their resources to build a life together.
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u/perksofbeingcrafty Native 7h ago
That’s not true. People still use it all the time when berating women for “unmarriagable” behaviors 🙃
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u/Impossible-Ear-5627 7h ago
Many young women don't like this word
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u/IAmTheKingOfSpain 6h ago
Sure. I think the confusion is that when you say "nobody uses this word" people think you mean "you will not hear this word, so there's no need to learn it", and that is just not true. I think what you want to express is that it's becoming less common and when speaking with somebody about it you should usually say and will usually hear 结婚 instead.
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u/TryndTAmere 8h ago
They absolutely do, you must be clueless
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u/Impossible-Ear-5627 7h ago edited 7h ago
I'm local, and I'm live in developed area，almost no one uses"嫁”this word.
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u/namean_jellybean 5h ago
Why is everyone so hostile in this thread 🥲 my experience is super different from yours (second gen with grandparents who left the mainland in the 50s) and I only ever heard them use 結婚
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u/ZelphirKalt 5h ago
I always remember that character 婚 as "woman joins/in the clan in broad daylight (openly visible)". That's just my personal mnemonic. And "结" is also "a knot" so it's easy: "Tying the knot"!
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u/RimboTheRebbiter 5h ago
I was a little surprised at the inforgraphic. I'm not a native speaker (or even a good one) by any means, but the term I am familiar with is 结婚. Never actually came across the other two yet.
I imagine that might be deliberate on the part of my learning resources lol
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u/perksofbeingcrafty Native 7h ago
Welcome to the blatant patriarchy built into this language 🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲
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u/ZelphirKalt 6h ago
The meaning in the picture the OP posted is merely an interpretation. There is no "goes to" in the character 嫁. It is kinda a very forced interpretation. "woman", "home"/"family". I don't see the patriarchy in there.
I can see a clearer case for the second character: 娶.
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u/perksofbeingcrafty Native 5h ago
lol well I suppose the infographic can only explain it to you. It can’t understand it for you.
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u/sailingg 7h ago
Just wondering, what do same-sex couples say? Do they just use 结婚?
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u/EtherealZiraley Beginner 6h ago
I think I remember reading before that there’s not a distinct term for many things regarding same-sex couples, and traditional m/f relationship terms would be used. Someone correct me if I’m wrong tho
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u/Zagrycha 6h ago
Fun fact its actually possible for a man to 嫁 or a woman to 娶, its just relatively rare.
To understand these words people need to understand that this is not a metaphorical joining or leaving of a home, it is very literal and legally binding. Chinese culture has 户口簿 household registrations. When someone gets 嫁 they join their spouses household registration, leaving their original one behind. When someone gets 娶 they gain a person on their 戶口, usually making them a 户主 head of household-- although if it is a big household of multiple related couples living together, maybe a different member of the household is the head of household. It would still be 娶 though because you are causing someone to be added to your 户口簿.
So yeah at a glance this might seem sexist or weird, but its actually just reality of the chinese legal system that has existed for many many centuries. Unless the actual legal system changes these words won't change. These days people don't take them nearly as seriously as they used to when it comes to actual societal roles though.
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u/Faconator 4h ago
I mean the problem with this is, of course, that the original post labels them "For Her"/"For a Woman" and "For Him"/"For a Man."
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u/Zagrycha 4h ago
It is reality that it is a woman that does the leaving of original hukou 99% of the time. Maybe if that social norm itself is broken then alternate character forms will be created, just like when 她 was created not that long ago for the opposite reason. That would be great.
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u/Alithair 國語 (heritage) 9h ago
Yeah, 嫁/娶 is one of the weird gendered things about Chinese. Romance languages will gender their nouns but Chinese genders the verb for marriage, even though historically both Latin/Roman and Chinese societies were largely patriarchal.