哑 (yǎ): mute

Meanings

1 mute
2 unable to speak
3 hoarse

Characters

哑

yǎ

mute; hoarse

Examples

HSK 4

哑巴吃黄连，有苦说不出。

Yǎba chī huánglián, yǒu kǔ shuō bù chū.

A mute eating bitter herbs - suffering in silence with no way to complain.

HSK 7-9

他天生就是哑的。

Tā tiānshēng jiùshì yǎ de.

He was born mute.

HSK 7-9

她嗓子喊哑了。

Tā sǎngzi hǎn yǎ le.

She shouted herself hoarse.

Tips

usage

哑 can mean physically mute or temporarily hoarse. 哑巴 is the noun for a mute person. 聋哑 means deaf-mute.

register

The everyday reading is yǎ (mute, hoarse). A minor reading yā is onomatopoeic - the caw of a crow (哑哑) or a baby's first babble - and is also an old variant of the particle 呀. Modern texts rarely need the yā reading; treat yǎ as the working one.

Components

radical

口 kǒu

mouth

Left-side mouth radical - a small square depicting an open mouth. Indexes 哑 in the speech family alongside 唱 to sing, 喊 to shout, 叫 to call. Here it names what fails: a mouth that cannot produce voice. Most speech chars are marked by 口, including the negation of speech itself.

phonetic

亚 yà

second; Asia

Right side 亚 supplies the sound: yà drifted to yǎ with tone change. The second-rate or inferior connotation of classical 亚 happens to overlap with the social marginalization of mutes in pre-modern society - a faint semantic echo, though the pairing is primarily phonetic.