All Earthen Walls are Built to be Removed

壁[bì] is an interesting word.

The word is a phono-semantic compound word like almost every other word does.

However, there is a fascinating philosophical perspective of this word that will make fortune cookie lovers smile.

The indexed radical of 壁[bì] is “earth” 土[tǔ], a 3-stroke radical located at the bottom two-thirds of the layout.

“Earth” 土[tǔ] is the semantic component. That is not a surprise, since all walls are built with earth. Even the Great Walls of China were built with pounded earth.

What interesting is the phonetic root of this word.

The representative of this phonetic root is 辟[bì] which, in its standalone glyph, is a pictograph depicted a body, at the left, with a separated head and a death scythe at the right.

Therefore, the vocal sound of 辟[bì] that originally represents capital punishment is thus associated with an extended meaning of “to break” or “to remove.”

Amazingly, the word creator utilized nothing else but the vocal sound of 辟[bì], “to remove,” as the phonetic root of the construction of “wall” 壁[bì].

That gives a philosophical perspective to this word — “All earthen walls are built to be removed.”

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☝ The materials of this post are extracted from Lesson 10 of Learn Chinese with Serena, a YouTube video series.