There are many kinds of traditional Chinese culture, such as clothing culture, traditional Xi culture, Chinese character culture, etc., and Chinese characters as a tool for people's daily communication will also have many deep connotations.
So today, let's talk about why there is still the word "mother" symbolizing great maternal love in the word "poison"?
Chinese characters have a history of more than 4,000 years, from the earliest oracle bone inscription to the current simplified Chinese characters, each period of the characters have a different way of writing, and the word "poison" is the same.
The earliest word "poison" was not as concise as it is now, it was written in a very complex way, and the word first appeared in hieroglyphs thousands of years ago.
Hieroglyphs, as the name suggests, is to write the text as what it represents, and our current stick figure is somewhat similar, when people mentioned poison first reaction is some poisonous food or animals, such as poisonous mushrooms, poisonous snakes, poisonous scorpions, etc., so in the hieroglyphs "poison" is written in a way that is somewhat similar to the appearance of plants and animals.
But none of this has anything to do with the word "mother", so how did it evolve into what it is today?
The evolution of Chinese characters is from complex to simple, and the first stage of Chinese characters is shaped by the sounds made by the things they represent, such as the pronunciation of Chinese characters "mother" and "father" are all evolved from the cry of "ah" when the baby is born.
In the second stage, people learned many new things, some of which could not be expressed by sound, so they used the method of painting to express the meaning they represented.
With the passage of time and the progress of knowledge, people began to understand a lot of knowledge that is just a concept, this kind of writing is mostly based on emotional things, and the previous methods have not been able to demonstrate it perfectly, so the wise ancients have insight into the truth in these Chinese characters, and then combine them with the previous words, so as to make the words more diverse.
Combined with the above evolutionary process, the word "poison" has also changed from the earliest stereotype of what it looks like to a stereotype of how to understand it.
In fact, in the matrilineal clan society a long time ago, people were tasted by their mothers before they understood the toxicity of a food, not only for us humans, but also in the process of studying other animals: when people feed animal food, especially some young animals, their mothers always try to see if it will cause harm to their children, and only after confirming that it is harmless will they give their children to eat.
The ancients who observed this added the word "mother" to the stereotype of the word "poison", which does not mean that the mother will do anything bad to the child, but on the contrary, it is also a manifestation of the mother's great dedication to protecting the child.
Before the advent of our simplified Chinese characters, the side of the word "poison" was not "mother", but "wu".
In the long-term evolution of Chinese characters, "poison" only became what it is now when simplified Chinese characters appeared, and there are only two reasons for this, the first is purely for more convenience, and the second reason is the selfless greatness of maternal love, and the spirit of testing poison for the son.
However, no matter what the Chinese characters evolve into, it will not affect the traditional virtues of filial piety in our Chinese nation, and we must take care of our mother as she took care of herself when she was a child.