Is 大丈夫 possibly phonetic?


So, I started learning Kanji recently, and was learning the character 大. Given
as an example usage was 大丈夫, or daijoubu. I found this as odd since the idea
of big doesn't seem to fit into the idea of "Everything is ok" or "Safe". Then
I realized that the character 大 in chinese is pronounced "Da", and that gave
me a hunch that possible the choice of characters was phonetic. I looked up
the whole phrase in chinese and found "Dàzhàngfū" to be the listed
pronunciation. So it looks like daijoubu may have been spelled based on the
chinese pronunciation of the characters 大丈夫. Has anyone noticed this or have
any sources that would support this theory?




The word 大丈夫 is not a phonetic transcription; its characters were chosen by
meaning, not by sound. However, it's a Chinese loanword; and, in Japanese, its
meaning has drifted from the original, so that the characters don't make much
sense anymore (just like, in English, the meaning of Latin roots may not
reflect a word's current sense; for example, "transpire" is Latin for "to
breathe across", not "to take place").

In Chinese, 丈夫 _zhàngfu_ meant "man", and 大丈夫 _dàzhàngfu_ , literally "big
man", was a word for "real man, true man; splendid man". The word was imported
into Japanese, where its meaning gradually shifted to "strong", "vigorous",
"healthy", and from that to the current usage. (The original meanings are
still listed in dictionaries, though they're now rare.)

In general, it's best to treat the kanji components of Japanese words (both
_on-yomi_ , Chinese loans, and _kun-yomi_ , native words) as you would the
Latin or Greek components of English words. They're generally useful to guess
the meaning of a word; but, often enough, the meaning of a word is more than
the sum of its parts, and sometimes the components can be downright
misleading.

Sources: [Gogen](http://gogen-allguide.com/ta/daijyoubu.html), Pleco PLC.




The word 大丈夫 is not a phonetic transcription; its characters were chosen by
meaning, not by sound. However, it's a Chinese loanword; and, in Japanese, its
meaning has drifted from the original, so that the characters don't make much
sense anymore (just like, in English, the meaning of Latin roots may not
reflect a word's current sense; for example, "transpire" is Latin for "to
breathe across", not "to take place").

In Chinese, 丈夫 _zhàngfu_ meant "man", and 大丈夫 _dàzhàngfu_ , literally "big
man", was a word for "real man, true man; splendid man". The word was imported
into Japanese, where its meaning gradually shifted to "strong", "vigorous",
"healthy", and from that to the current usage. (The original meanings are
still listed in dictionaries, though they're now rare.)

In general, it's best to treat the kanji components of Japanese words (both
_on-yomi_ , Chinese loans, and _kun-yomi_ , native words) as you would the
Latin or Greek components of English words. They're generally useful to guess
the meaning of a word; but, often enough, the meaning of a word is more than
the sum of its parts, and sometimes the components can be downright
misleading.

Sources: [Gogen](http://gogen-allguide.com/ta/daijyoubu.html), Pleco PLC.

