Abstract
The phono-semantic compound characters 悅yuè, 說shuō and 脫tuō which take their sound from 兌duì belongs to the same word family together with 奪duó. The core meaning found in this word family is to “release”. The character 悅yuè means to release something that rackles in the mind and feel at ease and content (to relieve), 說shuō is to release some thoughts and feelings with words (to explain), and 脫tuō is to release the body from something covering or tying it (to take off) or to release oneself from a place (to escape). Here, 脫tuō refers to the act of releasing done by “myself”. If the act is done by others, it is 奪duó which means “to take away”. In the past, studies on word families in old Chinese were limited to grouping certain ranges of characters that are correlated in terms of sounds and meanings, but now, based on advanced reconstruction phonology, it has been made possible to identify the root and examine how the words were derived from the root in a relatively specific way. According to the morphological markedness theory, the root of this word family appears to be *lod悅, and the word differentiated by adding the prefix h- is considered *hljod說, while *l˳ʰo:d脫and *l
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