Yin and yang Da Cidian") enter "yangyin" *陽陰. While "yang" and "yin" can occur together in context, "yangyin" is not synonymous with "yinyang". The linguistic term "irreversible binomial" refers to a collocation of two words A-B that cannot be idiomatically reversed as B-A, for example, English "cat and mouse" (not *"mouse and cat") and "friend or foe" (not *"foe or friend"). Similarly, the usual pattern among Chinese binomial compounds is for positive A and negative B, where the A word is dominant or privileged over B, for example, "tiandi" 天地 "heaven and earth" and "nannü" 男女 "men and women". "Yinyang" meaning "dark and
Yin and yang "to shelter; shade", and 陽 or 阳 "sunny" is always pronounced with rising second tone "yáng". Sinologists and historical linguists have reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciations from data in the (7th century CE) "Qieyun" rhyme dictionary and later rhyme tables, which was subsequently used to reconstruct Old Chinese phonology from rhymes in the (11th-7th centuries BCE) "Shijing" and phonological components of Chinese characters. Reconstructions of Old Chinese have illuminated the etymology of modern Chinese words. Compare these Middle Chinese and Old Chinese (with asterisk) reconstructions of "yīn" 陰 and "yáng" 陽: Schuessler gives probable Sino-Tibetan etymologies for both Chinese words. "Yin"