Etymology
Tiān is the modern Mandarin Chinese pronunciation. The Old Chinese pronunciation has been reconstructed as lin; the Middle Chinese, as then.
The modern Chinese character 天 combines 大 ("big") and 一 ("one"). However, 大 was originally a stick figure stretching out his arms to denote a large size: some of the original Shang oracle bone and Zhou bronzeware characters do not top him with "one" but with an extremely large head, either square or round and sometimes marked with a line or two. Schuessler (2007:495) notes the similarity between the bronze ideograms for tian with those for 丁, the fourth "celestial stem", and takes this to indicate that the original meaning may have simply been "sky" rather than any sort of deity.
There are more recent variant characters as well. Two examples are 兲 ("king" and "eight") and the Taoist 靝 ("blue" and "qi").
Read more about this topic: Tian
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