哑 (yǎ): mute

Meanings

1 mute
2 unable to speak
3 hoarse

Characters

哑

yǎ

mute; hoarse

Examples

他天生就是哑的。

Tā tiānshēng jiùshì yǎ de.

He was born mute.

她嗓子喊哑了。

Tā sǎngzi hǎn yǎ le.

She shouted herself hoarse.

哑巴吃黄连，有苦说不出。

Yǎba chī huáng lián, yǒu kǔ shuō bù chū.

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

Tips

usage

哑 can mean physically mute or temporarily hoarse. 哑巴 (yǎba) is the noun for a mute person. 聋哑 (lóngyǎ) 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 (yā). 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 (here phonetic)

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.