奶 (naai5)

In celebration of World Breastfeeding Week, this week’s character is 奶 (naai5 / milk).

The character 奶 has two components:

1. the left half is the character 女 (neoi5 / female, a very important radical) and
2. the right half of the character comes from the top half of 孕 (jan6 / pregnant).

孕 (jan6 / pregnant) is actually a fascinating character that I did not know, as when we speak in Cantonese, we normally refer to pregnancy as 大肚 (daai6 tou / big belly).

孕 (jan6 / pregnant) is comprised of the character 子 (zi3 / child, another important radical) inside what looks like a woman’s belly!

It is one of the many beautiful examples of why Chinese is such an amazing language – even if you don’t immediately know what a particular character is, if you understand how Chinese characters are derived and constructed, you can intuit a character’s meaning just from how it is written.