Egocentric

This Qin-era weapon is called a “gē”.  It usually gets translated into English as “spear” or “pike” or “dagger axe”, but as you can see from the picture it’s kind of weirder than any of those and I can’t really think of a good Western equivalent.  (Then again, I had always thought I knew the difference between a “two-handed sword” and a “hand-and-a-half sword” but that just lead to me spending an unhealthy amount of time poring over nomenclature in this Wikipedia discussion page.  So what do I know?)

I had never seen a gē in real life but I had heard about them tons because the Chinese written language is littered with them.   Let me explain.

Tons of other Chinese characters include 戈 (gē).  Seemingly unrelated words like “salty” (咸) and “prestige” (威).  But the reason that I feel like I see this character all the time is that is the right half of the character for the pronoun “I” (我).  It’s supposed to represent a hand (手) holding a gē (戈).

Now that I’ve finally seen one up close and personal, I know what “I” am supposed to look like.