Noncompositional

I begin with a story.

Once in China there lived a man who loved to raise monkeys. He loved his monkeys so much that his family left him and he was left with his pets. Thankfully for him, he could speak with these monkeys, and so knew exactly what they wanted; and he always provided. But one day, he realized that his funds had been depleted so much that he could no longer afford to feed them their favorite food (nuts) as much as they wanted. So he told them one morning, “from now on, I will only give each of you three nuts each morning, and four each evening.” The monkeys were not pleased, and pleaded with him to reconsider. After thinking a while, he presented a new plan: “all right, I will give you four each morning, but then only three in the evening.” The monkeys were very pleased with this plan, and did not complain further.

And so today in Chinese, the phrase 朝三暮四 (zhao1 san1 mu4 si4, ‘morning three dusk four’) indicates someone who constantly changes their opinion, or who is unreliable or irresponsible.

Uh…wait, but in Japanese (and, I believe, Korean), it means something rather different. According to the 大辞林, it has three meanings. The first: to be so taken in by superficial concerns that you don’t realize that any current decision won’t have any impart on the outcome; the second: to deceive someone with language. Let’s stop there for now. What happened? Basically, it looks like while Japanese has preserved a meaning of the phrase that is much closer to its origins, Chinese has decided to throw tradition out the window and allow semantic change to corrupt run its course.

Now, what about the third meaning the dictionary gives? “A means of living.” I’m not sure what’s going on with that. It could be some sort of semantic change, or it could be a sort of “homophonous proverb.”

This is actually a pattern that should be familiar to anyone who studies modern Japanese and Chinese. For instance, many of the characters that Japanese uses for basic verbs were chosen based on older meanings that have since changed in Chinese. So, 進 is used for ‘move forward’ in Japanese, but it means ‘to enter’ in modern Mandarin. The older meaning is preserved in compounds like 進歩 ‘progress’ and 進化 ‘evolution’. Similarly, 使 is used in Japanese for ‘to use’, but in Mandarin it means ‘to make/cause’, though it is still in compounds like 使用 ‘to use’.