Taxonomy of meanings for 己:　　

Additional information about 己

說文解字: 【己】，中宮也。象萬物辟藏詘形也。 〔小徐本「詘」下有「之」。〕 己承戊，象人腹。 〔小徐本「腹」下有「也」。 凡己之屬皆从己。 【居擬切】 【𢀒】，古文己。

Criteria
• SUICIDE
  

  1. The general term for suicide is zì shā 自殺, and 殺己 is hardly ever used for suicide.

  2. Zì cǎi 自裁 refers to suicide by cutting oneself in some way or other.

  3. Zì jìn 自盡 is politely periphrastic and refers to putting an end to one's life in any way.

  4. Zì wěn 自刎 refers to a dramatic act of cutting one's own throat.

  5. Zì jīng 自經 refers to suicide by strangling oneself.

  6. Zì chén 自沉 refers to suicide by drowning.

  7. Sǐ 死 is often used causatively and reflexively to refer to an act of suicide.

• ASK
  

  [ASCENDING/DESCENDING]

  [[COMMON/RARE]]

  [GENERAL/SPECIFIC]

  [INFORMAL/OFFICIAL]

  1. The general word is wèn 問 "open a dialogue by consulting someone with a question" (ant. duì 對 "reply to a superior") which typically refers to the consultation of a person who is supposed to know something. When the adressee is explicit, the questioner is typically of higher status than the addressee, and the reply is correspondingly often phrased politely as duì yuē 對曰. When there is no explicit addressee (X asked about Y), the addressee often is of higher status (e.g. a teacher).

  [SPECIFIC]; [[COMMOM+]]

  2. Qǐng 請 is occasionally used to refer to polite requests for information.

  [[RARE]]

  3. Nàn 難 is to ask intellectually hostile questions regarding something which the person questioned has said or maintains as true, to make objections. See DISAGREE and REFUTE which are difficult to distinguish from each other and from this.

  [SPECIFIC], [HORIZONTAL]

  4. Fǎng 訪 typically refers to questioning addressed to superiors.

  [ASCENDING]

  5. Xún 詢 typically refers to rather formal questions addressed to inferiors.

  [DESCENDING], [OFFICIAL]

  6. Zī 諮／咨 refers to questions addressed to a specialist.

  [SPECIFIC]

  7. Zōu 諏 all refer to some kind of official soliciting of formal opinions.

  [OFFICIAL]; [[RARE]]

  8. Yuē 曰 is regularly used to introduce related questions as reactions within an ongoing dialogue.

  <div>9. Wèi 謂 may introduce what are in fact questions rather than statements.</div><div><br></div><div>10. Wèn yuē 問曰 introduces a a question that opens a new dialogue or a discrete new phase in a dialogue.</div><div><br></div><div>NB: ASKing in Chinese us always dialogic: one cannot ask oneself any question 問己, and one cannot abstractly just raise an abstract question as an intellectual issue worthy of discussion. There seems to be no word in classical Chinese for "asking a question" without addressing this question to an audience.<br></div><br>

• PERSON
  

  1. Shēn 身 regularly refers to the embodied person, as something to be cultivated and corrected, and as something to be morally careful about, but the word is originally widely used to refer to the physical body as such, and this usage continues throughout pre-Buddhist times being at times hard to distinguish from the figurative use discussed in this group. Moreover, the word is very often reflexive.

  2. Qū 軀 is a rare poetic word that can be used to refer to one's embodied person.

  3. Jǐ 己 can occasionally refer to one's own person rather than simply to oneself, but the distinction is not marked and should perhaps be disregarded lexically as being imposed by context only.

  For the concept of personality, see CHARACTER, and particularly the concept of 為人 "constitutive features of someone's character".

  NB: The notion of the personality as something inner and disembodied, only inhabiting a physical as something outward, is alien to ancient Chinese thought. See, however, SOUL, where a number of mentalistic terms are in strict opposition to the physical body. The Chinese words for the person are not in this group.

• PERSONALLY
  

  1. The current word for doing something personally is zì 自 (ant.* rén 人 "others").

  2. Qīn 親 (ant.* jiè 藉 and píng 憑 "via others") emphasises that a person who might have chosen not to condescend to do something personally actually decided to do it, and the word naturally tends to be limited to subjects of a fairly high social status.

  3. Gōng 躬 refers to doing something oneself demonstratively, and the word emphasises the moral responsibility of the agent for what he or she does rather than (like jǐ 己 "he himself, rather than someone else") laying any contrastive stress on the fact that the agent and not someone else engages in the action concerned.

  4. Qiè 竊 is very often used in polite formal discourse to indicate subjectiveness of attitudes that are being submitted to a superior. Thus this word is highly limited in application and somewhat marginal in the group.

  5. Shēn 身 "in person" hovers between an adverbial and a nominal function and is sometimes hard to distinguish from the meaning "himself" classified under SELF, which is common in contrastive in parallelistic constructions.

• SELF
  

  1. The most general-use word referring to oneself is jǐ 己, and this word refers regularly to the highest subject in the whole sentence in which it occurs. In reflexivising object position of a main verb it serves as a "heavy" reflexive pronoun like German "sich selbst", Latin se ipsum.

  2. Zì 自 is preverbal and typically makes any transitive verb it precedes reflexive, when another object is present it refers to an action being performed not by any other subject than the grammatical subject. As a reflexivising pronoun often glossable as 自己把自己 the pronoun has the double function of emphatic subject AND identical object.

  3. Shēn 身 typically refers to the subject in a contrastive way, and the word is often hard to distinguish from the nominal concept of a PERSON. Adverbially, the word is different from PERSONALLY in that it does not connote distinction in the agent.

  4. Gōng 躬 is a fairly rare archaic and idiomatically restricted word referrring to the agent himself.

Word relations
• Ant: (ONESELF)彼/THAT
• Ant: (ONESELF)彼/THAT
• Object: (SELF)審/INVESTIGATE The most general words for investigating something are chá 察 "sort out clearly" and shen 審 "investigate carefully". 1 Attribution
• Oppos: (ONESELF)人/OTHER Rén 人 refers indefinitely to other persons, in the singular (someone else) or in the plural (other people), but never as "the other person" or as "the other people." 9 Attributions
• Oppos: (ONESELF)彼/OTHER1 Attribution