Writing about God

[geraldc]

For reasons I won't bore you with, I attended a Chinese church service the other day. One thing I noticed was that in the version of the lords prayer that was printed on the service sheet, when referring to Him upstairs, rather than using 你 they replaced the 人radical with 礻making 礻尓. It didn't seem to be standard, as they also had psalm 23 printed out and that used plain 你 when referring to the Almighty.

Any rules and regs when using 礻尓? Although seeing as I don't know how to type it, its unlikely I'll be using it much.

I did also wonder why it was a variation of 你 and not 您 too.

[Xiao Kui]

I don't know how the tradition came but I've also seen it in Chinese churches, and that alternate radical on the left side is the radical for "reveal" which was originally a pictograph of an altar and often used to refer to a god or gods. So I think it's out of respect and to distinguish it from 你 . 祂 is also commonly used as a substitution for 他 in hymns. I'd also add that it doesn't seem to be necessary (at least not in all Christian traditions) because most Chinese Bibles (simplified at least) simply use the regular 你 or 他 when referring to God or Christ. Also, my simplified IME (NJ Star) doesn't have either of these characters - I had to switch to traditional to find them - makes me wonder if they're more popular in HK, Taiwan, and overseas than they are in the mainland.

[xianu]

I have actually seen ni that way in a Wang Fei song. I interpretted it as a way to express the reverence and love she had for the object of her song (love song, of course). I figured it was just a sort of poetic made-up character that made a play on the meanings of words.

[muyongshi]

The history is quite obvious of this usage.

Missionary's way back in the day didn't like the association of god being put with the man or woman radical so they opted to edit and use the "god" radical so as to describe that he is not of the human persuasion. It stayed longer in taiwan and hong kong due to the openness of the catholic church.

[rootfool]

Agree with muyongshi.

In the past 祂 was not a character in chinese,and 祢 also didn't mean GOD.祢 is another form of 禰 ,It means put your father's 灵位(sorry but I don't know how to say it in english) in the temple(生曰父，亡曰考，入庙曰襧).

Look at this character:禅，社，祇，神，祖，祈.They all have the radical 示 .In chinese it means something about GOD.So I think that's the reason people opt 祢 or 祂 for GOD.