亡

• Persons: Death, often with a nuance of "vanishing" or being "lost."
• States/Institutions: Destruction, collapse, or the falling of a dynasty or city.
• Objects: Loss; to misplace or be deprived of something.
• Movement (Early Texts): Fleeing, escaping, or disappearing from a location.

• Intransitive: To perish, die, or fall (the subject undergoes the loss).
• Transitive: To lose something (the subject is deprived of an object).

• 亡 vs. 死: While both can be translated as "death," 亡 frequently implies a loss of status, existence, or presence in the world. In political contexts, "destroyed" or "fallen" is often preferable to "died."
• Ambiguity of Scale: The glyph does not specify magnitude; it may range from a material annoyance (lost item) to personal tragedy (death) to geopolitical catastrophe (collapse of a regime).

• Semantic variants: U+5166, U+4EBE.

// Tang-period reading: //miɑng miɑng*.

• Paleographic Caution: While conceptually related to 忘 (forget) and 妄 (reckless/false), these are distinct glyphs in standardized script. Do not translate 妄 as "death" or "loss" unless there is specific paleographic evidence in the manuscript suggesting scribal interchangeability.