掲示板 Forums - What is radicals in kanji?

​Well, it indeed does happen very often, but not always; and it works better in Chinese than Japanese (where there are quite often drifts in the phonetic part, due to the fact that words have been borrowed from different dialects of China, or from different periods - or even just Japanese mispronunciations that got so widespread they became standard).

There are basically 3 kind of kanji :

1. kanji that fully depict the thing/concept. They may be an actual picture (like 山象鳥魚目口歯...) or some abstract conceptualization (like 一二三天上回...)

2. kanji that associate several elements, each of them choosen for meaning (like 明, bright, from 日, sun, and 月 moon; or 好, from 女 and 子,..., or 林, 森, ...)

3. kanji that associate en element (almost always it is the radical) for meaning categorization, and the rest for the sound (of course, having a wide choice of elements with the same or nearly same sound, the choice of a given one is also influenced by the meaning that component may have; for 花, flower, 化 is not the single thing with that sound, but the idea of "change, maing into" of 化 is fitting for a flower, as it will indeed become a fruit).

Group 1 are the oldest, probably started as pictures way before the people drawing them came with the idea of "writing".

Group 2 is a more abstract extension of the first one; and by reusing elements a kind of standardization of such common elements started to happen. That standardization of shapes got back into group 1, some shapes have been rewritten to be more in line with what started to become commn patterns.

Group 3 is the most prolific; more than 80% of all existing kanji are in such category, and any "new" kanji (that is, created in the last millenia) is most probably of that kind too (that is certainly the case of all the ones created in the 1800/1900s)

Now, there also things that come to blur things.

Sometimes, a given kanji has its meaning drifted, because the thing it described changed, or a secondary, abstract or imaginative meaning, became prevalent to the point of eclipsing the original one (for example, who knows what the original meaning of 亜 or 欧 once were ? they now stand for "Asia" and "Europe". There are also meaning confusions over time or places (kanji misread, misremembered; or simply, when adopted into Japanese, the Japanese people didn't knew about the original thing, and tought of a similar thing they knew instead (a lot of kanji of animals have diverging meanings in Chinese and Japanese due to that).

Then there is... "kanji substitution" !! A kanji that is not so common is replaced with another one of same sound, but that may have a completely different meaning; that blurs the etimology a lot at times. Often that substitution is done by keeping the phonetic element and changing the radical (or using the phonetic part alone, like in Chinese 麺 (noodle) being written now 面 (that is, "noodle" and "face" are nowadays written the same in Chinese). In Jheapanese crossroad used to be 交叉点 and is now written 交差点; 叉 does mean fork/crutch, but 差 has been put in its place just for the sound (well, and also a little bit for the meaning of "difference, divergence" I guess). The result of those changes may be a new kanji (not pre-existing), in such case, it is called "simplification", like 醫 becoming 医.

Speaking of, I just observed something this morning on my social media feed and while looking into it, I found something interesting.

It's not my first time knowing that sometimes there's a different version of kanji where its context could be just a bit different than how one conceptualizes kanji today. Though, it might have some strange gaps here and there. May or may not mess with your mnemonics, but could be helpful.

食, for example, had people not realizing the top part was the stroke for person. 人.

In the past, specifically for 食, it actually used to represent a mouth. Go figure.

The bottom part is quite interesting. It's just basically like 良. As in, 良い, the old form of いい.

However, that doesn't really end there. The bottom part used to be something different: 皀. Basically, that in itself is two parts and supposedly supposed to represent some type of grain held by some kind of bamboo basket (for which the 音読み also happens to have the same sound in katakana, ヒ, literally meaning "spoon", but we can use our imagination here).

IMO, the original makes a lot of sense for what the kanji would mean. I don't yet know why there was a sudden shift in the way it was written into what it is nowadays, so you'll have to make do.

This also reminds me of how 月 is sometimes a radical meant to relate to meat/flesh, but at least that story makes sense.