Hate evil

For those who do not read Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese, this will give you a taste:

惡惡（恶恶）

Forgive me for not telling you right away how to read these characters.  In truth, they are many different ways to pronounce them, and they all mean something different.  I will only go fairly deeply into two of the different readings and will just touch upon the others.

The first pair of characters are identical traditional forms of the same graph, the second pair are identical simplified forms of the same graph.

The strokes of the simplified form of the graph are easy to count (10), but those of the traditional form are beastly difficult to count accurately (different people count them different ways, but the standard total is supposedly 12 — go figure).

The four dots at the bottom of the character constitute the heart radical / semantophore, indicating that it has something to do with feelings / emotions, while the residual strokes at the top amount to the phonophore, giving a rough approximation of its sound.

Whether traditional or simplified, at least six different etymologies apply to this character, and it has at least six different pronunciations in MSM, some of which are contested:  è, wù, wū, ě, hū, yà.  I will merely discuss the meanings of the first two pronunciations:  è ("evil"; "wicked"; "foul"; "fierce"; "hostile"; "ferocious") and wù ("hate"; "loathe"; "dislike").

How shall we read the disyllabic term / expression / phrase 惡惡?  What does it mean?  If you encountered it in the wild, you wouldn't know how to pronounce it or what it means.

惡惡 is actually a fixed expression in many classical texts dating back to two thousand and more years ago.  It's from those ancient (con)texts and the heritage of feeling and thought they passed down to you through the ages that you know 惡惡 is pronounced wùè and means "hate evil" — verb noun.

Still, confusion reigns.  惡惡（恶恶）does appear in zdic, the most widely used and reputable online dictionary of Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese.  In fact, 惡惡 occurs twice, both times with the same meaning, "zēnghèn xié'è 憎恨邪恶" ["hate evil"]), but with contrary pronunciations:  "èwù" and "wùè".

You have to be learned to read this sort of thing.

 

Selected readings

• "Translating from Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic to Mandarin" (1/14/24)
• "Hype over AI and Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic" (11/9/23) — with lengthy bibliography
• "Why Literary Sinitic is so darn hard" (5/30/19)