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not sure if you're coming from a purely japanese background, but in chinese 左 and 右 both have the same stroke order for the upper left portion. and to show jus
by dastbe 9y ago
not sure if you're coming from a purely japanese background, but in chinese 左 and 右 both have the same stroke order for the upper left portion.
and to show just how ridiculous han unification is, on my laptop your example makes no sense because the 臭 has a 犬!
- glandium 9y agoFacepalm. I actually was aware of the han unification of 自+犬 and 自+大 as 臭 (U+81ED), but forgot about it. There's now also 臭 (U+FA5C), that is 自+犬.
- mc32 9y agoAlso, radicals and roots can adjust shape to accommodate the partner, so they can vary in exact shape from one character context to another.
- dastbe 9y agothis is true, though these cases are fairly limited and 𠂇 is not a radical (you would look it up as 丿+ 1) after looking through my dictionary, it appears that 右 was originally written with 又 which is a pictograph of a right hand (no idea if the split-top was an accepted variation of the radical or the original form) and was later standardized to use 𠂇 for both characters. Japanese picked them up before the standardization occurred and so missed out on the homogenization. this also makes 友 a combination of the left and right hand, which imo is kind of cool.
- glandium 9y agoAccording to Japanese dictionaries, 友 comes from 又+又, which makes it a combination of two right hands.
- glandium 9y ago> Japanese picked them up before the standardization occurred and so missed out on the homogenization. Actually, the writing with 𠂇 is older than the japanese using the characters. The wikipedia page on stroke order suggests the homogenization in stroke order might have happened last century.
- glandium 9y agoSo interestingly, for 左 and 右, the etymological stroke order is the japanese one. It was "simplified" in mainland China and Taiwan.
- patal 9y agoDo you have a source for your claim? Particularly, you're suggesting that the stroke order for the top left part was once different in China. I'd really like to see a document on this.
- dastbe 9y agoI can buy that, as I know the top left portion in chinese historically is for the left hand. If the historical variation of right was for the right hand, that would make a lot of sense.
- patal 9y agoAre you really suggesting that writers changed hands during writing a single character? That sounds totally impractical. Also, that does not explain why there should be a different stroke order.
- Manishearth 9y agoNo, 左 is "left" and 右 is "right", they're saying that the 𠂇 radical itself means "left hand", and they later added a similar one for "right hand". Looking it up (on wiktionary, at least) it seems like originally 又 was "right hand", however if you look at really old versions of that character it looks mostly like a mirror of 𠂇. Interestingly, Wiktionary lists both left and right as phonosemantic compounds where the phonetic part is "left hand" or "right hand" and the semantic part is "assist" and "mouth" (I think in this case the "mouth" is used to bolster the "pronounced like" of the phonosemantic compound, since it's used on the right side not the left). This seems to be because the word for "left hand" became the word for "left" and same for "right hand", so they're pronounced the same; and the semantic component was added later to bolster/specialize the glyph. Anyway, it seems like the 𠂇 radical in 右 is etymologically a variant of 又 which is a mirror of 𠂇 (well, a mirror of a three-pronged historical form of that) except it was rotated around the glyph so that it looks exactly like 𠂇 but the stroke order is reversed.