First all, I’m so thrilled and humbled by your genuine curiosity regarding my mother tongue, Mandarin Chinese. I will seek to be more comprehensive when I want to introduce Chinese characters from now on. Covering the etymology and all that.
Even though I work professionally as an English teacher, I converse in Mandarin at home with my children. Their mum is using Japanese with them, so this leaves me as the only person whom they can use Mandarin with on a regular basis.
Now that you understand my home situation, recently my son brought up the term “大人” (dà rén).
Let’s deep-dive into each of the characters:
You can observe that Chinese is more of a pictorial language than English. Different types of writing script existed in the past, and along with the introduction of a new writing script, Chinese characters evolved concurrently. 人 is meant to resemble a person who is walking 🚶♂️.
Moving on to 大
You can see that 大 resembles a majestic-looking person standing with his arms and legs spread out wide. Ancient people considered themselves to be the master of all sentient beings. This may account for the open body language; that’s why 大 means big.
So, when combined together, 大人 refers to an adult.
My son innocently said, “I am a 小人.”
I burst out laughing immediately. 小 (xiǎo) means small.
In the past, 小 was denoted by three short lines, depicting grains of sand. The central stroke grew longer and acquired a hook at the end.
Technically speaking, I can put 小 and 人 together to refer to a child, but hardly anyone does that. We use 小人 to refer to a scoundrel=. I think people will raise their eyebrows and frown if my son walks around, calling himself a 小人.
I corrected him on the spot and told him the cultural connotation of 小人. I have to thank him for letting me realise that language comprises so much more than the words themselves - some words have baggage!