奴

Translingual

Han character

奴 (Kangxi radical 38, 女+2, 5 strokes, cangjie input 女水 (VE), four-corner 4744₀, composition ⿰女又)

Derived characters

• 呶 怓 詉 笯 努 孥 帑 弩 怒 拏 砮 駑 鴑 𨾯

Descendants

• ぬ
• ヌ

References

• Kangxi Dictionary: page 254, character 26
• Dai Kanwa Jiten: character 6039
• Dae Jaweon: page 517, character 3
• Hanyu Da Zidian (first edition): volume 2, page 1024, character 7
• Unihan data for U+5974

Chinese

Glyph origin

Historical forms of the character 奴
Shang	Western Zhou	Warring States	Shuowen Jiezi (compiled in Han)	Liushutong (compiled in Ming)
Oracle bone script	Bronze inscriptions	Chu slip and silk script	Small seal script	Transcribed ancient scripts

Ideogrammic compound (會意／会意) : 女 (“woman”) + 又 (“hand”) – a hand capturing and ordering a woman around. 女 (OC *naʔ, *nas) may also be phonetic.

Some oracle bone script forms (not depicted above) are pictographic (象形) , showing a person (probably a woman) with hands crossed at the back, as opposed to 女 which depicts a woman clasping her hands in front of the body.

Etymology

Uncertain.

• Possibly cognate with Mru nar (“servant”) & Awa-Khumi Chin tana (Löffler, 1960);
• Ferlus (1999) relates this to 女 (OC *naʔ), which has semantic parallel, especially among foreign loans (e.g. 嬯 (OC *dɯː, “servant, slave woman”) which is possibly from Austroasiatic).
• Unger (1990) groups 奴 (OC *naː) as well as 努 (OC *naːʔ, “to tense, to exert”), 弩 (OC *naːʔ, “crossbow”), & 怒 (OC *naːs, “angry”), in a word-family with the basic meaning "tense", hence 奴 (OC *naː)'s meaning "press into service".

Pronunciation

Definitions

奴

1. slave; servant
2. (humble, polite) I

   爹娘生下奴就沒有照管 [MSC, trad.]
   爹娘生下奴就没有照管 [MSC, simp.]

   From: 白光 (báiguāng)《嘆十聲》

   diēniáng shēngxià nú jiù méiyǒu zhàoguǎn [Pinyin]

   (please add an English translation of this usage example)

3. (derogatory) a person associated with a particular identity or trait
4. to enslave

Synonyms

• (I):

Compounds

Japanese

Kanji

(common “Jōyō” kanji)

1. a thing, an object; (derogatory, familiar) a person

Readings

• Go-on: ぬ (nu)^{←ぬ (nu, historical)}
• Kan-on: ど (do, Jōyō)^{←ど (do, historical)}
• Kun: やっこ (yakko, 奴); やつ (yatsu, 奴); め (me, 奴)
• Nanori: ぬい (nui)

Etymology 1

Etymology 2

Etymology 3

Korean

Hanja

奴 (eumhun 종 노 (jong no))

1. Hanja form^? of 노 (“slave, servant”).

Vietnamese

Han character

奴: Hán Nôm readings: nô, no, nó, nọ

1. (colloquial) he, she, it

Usage notes

• Chữ Nôm.
• This is the common form of this character. The regular form is 伮.
• The term is de facto used to refer to any animal (including the human) in the third person, in a disrespectful manner. The use of the term to translate the English it, or to refer to an inanimate object, is rather artificial, and mostly found in awkward (but common) translation of other languages.

References

• www.chunom.org