I’m trying to read 常用字解 and can’t get one kanji in this entity because it is corrupted a little:
The whole thing looks like this:
I wonder if someone can deduce it because I can not get this entity fully right now
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I believe it’s 膺 (むね).
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Looks like it!
人の膺に隹を抱いている形
Should be something like “Form of a person holding a bird to the chest” I guess?
A strange choose of kanji for both むね and とり
But ye, I guess I can get it for むね because I can get into it’s origins now and maybe see how it is connected to 雁 and other derivations of it, so it might have been the whole intent
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I was trying to read this, but I want to warn anyone reading that it’s probably not a true story.
This kanji is 形声 meaning it it is compound of 2 different kanji, one of which is giving sound and the second - meaning.
I’m really just getting into etymology of kanji so I’m really not sure about anything, but from what I’ve read, when it is 形声 the one kanji giving sound is never giving the meaning, so probably in this case 雁 has been taken for reading, and has been chosen quite rendomly, could have been any other kanji with same reading, so the only thing giving the meaning “replay, answer” is 心
Unfortunately most articles and good books about all this are in Chinese, so it’s quite hard to get in there, as well as just finding the way into this topic, I guess I’ve just found just enough resources to start, but again they are all in Chinese.
The only reasonable solution I see now is to take all good books I can find, somehow train ai model on them, and get it working so it gives me all info, quotes and sources, so I don’t have to spend 20+ hours on each kanji trying to understand texts and articles in Chinese using same ai as a translator.
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They discuss this in the source you’ve posted above, by the way. The entire entry explains it fully but the below is where they directly mention this:
䧹は音符として用いられているだけでなく、䧹の意味をも含めて使われるので、このような関係を亦声という。
The language is a little tough, but if you carefully go over the whole passage you will see what they mean a bit more clearly, I think. (If it still doesn’t make sense then let me know and I can translate/explain it in English, but I don’t want to steal the chance of trying to understand it in Japanese from you!)
As for the kanji, this type of kanji is basically a mixture of 形声 and 会意. Please find more info in this thread. I actually was thinking of covering this type of kanji in the future in that thread. You’re correct that normally the phonetic component has no relations to the meaning, but there are some rarer exceptions. By the way, 亦声 is an extremely uncommon word, to my knowledge, and you are more likely to see 会意形声 or 会意兼形声 used to refer to this type of kanji.
There are some very good books on this stuff in Japanese but regardless of the language you will find a lot of inconsistencies between books as a lot of this stuff is worked out backwards or based on old (and probably untrustworthy) sources. The question is to what extent the editor/author trusts certain sources, and to what extent they are happy to make certain guesses or assumptions about things. The major Japanese scholars in this area are no less knowledgable than the Chinese ones, though.