買

買 (Kangxi radical 154, 貝+5, 12 strokes, cangjie input 田中月山金 (WLBUC), four-corner 6080₆, composition ⿱罒貝)

• 賣, 䁲, 㵋, 蕒, 鷶, 嘪

• Kangxi Dictionary: page 1206, character 21
• Dai Kanwa Jiten: character 36708
• Dae Jaweon: page 1669, character 9
• Hanyu Da Zidian (first edition): volume 6, page 3633, character 7
• Unihan data for U+8CB7

Historical forms of the character 買
Shang	Spring and Autumn
Bronze inscriptions	Bronze inscriptions

Ideogrammic compound (會意／会意) : 网 (“net”) + 貝 (“money cowrie”).

Baxter and Sagart (2014) consider it to be a phono-semantic compound (形聲／形声) : abbreviated phonetic 羅 (*rˤaj) + semantic 貝 (“money cowrie”).

Possibly from Proto-Sino-Tibetan *g/m/s-laj ~ *r/s-lej ~ *b-rej (“to buy; to barter”); compare Proto-Karen *breᴬ (“to buy”), Proto-Bodo-Garo *prai¹ (“to buy”), Tibetan རྗེ (rje, “to exchange; to barter”) (Schuessler, 2007; Sagart, 1999, 2011). Benedict (1967, 1972) considers this allofam to be a result of borrowing from Austro-Tai *(m)baḷi several times into Sino-Tibetan languages.

Alternatively, Haudricourt and Strecker (1991) consider 買 and 賣 to be borrowed from Hmong-Mien, which may have a family of verbs related to possession: *mɛjX (“to buy”, corresponding to 買), *mɛjH (“to buy”, corresponding to 賣), *ʔ-mɛj (“to grasp”), *n-mɛj (“to have”) (Ratliff, 2010). However, Sagart (1995) argues that the direction of borrowing is more likely to be from Chinese to Hmong-Mien because Hmong-Mien does not seem to have a suffix that would give rise to the tone in the word for “to buy”. In addition to these two ways of relating the Chinese word to Hmong-Mien, Ratliff (2010) proposes common inheritance as a third option and maintains that more evidence is needed to determine which of the three explanations are correct.

買

1. to buy; to purchase

   我買了輛新車。／我买了辆新车。  ―  Wǒ mǎi le liàng xīn chē.  ―  I bought a new car.

2. to bribe
3. to persuade
4. a surname

• (to buy): 賣／卖 (mài, “to sell”)

• → Proto-Hmong-Mien: *mɛjX (“to buy”)

• “Entry #9063”, in 臺灣閩南語常用詞辭典 [Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan] (in Chinese and Min Nan), Ministry of Education, R.O.C., 2023.

(grade 2 “Kyōiku” kanji)

1. to buy

• Go-on: め (me)
• Kan-on: ばい (bai, Jōyō)
• Kun: かう (kau, 買う, Jōyō)^{←かふ (kafu, 買ふ, historical)}

• 買収(ばいしゅう) (baishū)
• 買(か)い物(もの) (kaimono)

• 売

• 買(か)う (kau)

買 (eumhun 살 매 (sal mae))

1. Hanja form^? of 매 (“buy”).
2. "Goguryeo" language: *me, “river, water”

買: Hán Nôm readings: mãi, mạy, mảy, mấy, mới, mái, mải, với

1. This term needs a translation to English. Please help out and add a translation, then remove the text {{rfdef}}.