The Story of “来” and “麦”
Yang Wang, Shing
Graduate Student
Department of Asian Studies,
Jiajie
"Loan words" 假借 were
originally designed to represent words that are etymologically unrelated
to their current usage. However, because of phonetic similarity such totally
unrelated characters were borrowed to represent totally
different words.
When
checking the dictionary, one can see that the character 
was originally used in oracle-bone script to
denote "wheat," but was later borrowed to represent a verb 来 lai "to come." Therefore according to the definition
of the “Loan words” that the two characters, 来，麦（"to
come" and "wheat"）should have phonetic
similarity。However,
currently, 来，麦 are
pronounced differently.
The
essay is going to talk about the following topics.
1.
Were 来，麦 phonetically similar in
the ancient times?
2. Wheat 麦, rice稻, corn黍, millet稷，秫，稗，稊，秣…all belong to
the same species. Their appearances are similar, so how come rice稻, corn黍, millet稷，秫，稗，稊，秣… and other
crops have the same radical (禾) when they were created, while wheat麦doesn’t have that radical?
3. The origin and evolution of 来，and 麦.