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According to https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%B2%8C-2789579#goog_rewarded https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%B2%8C-2789579#goog_rewarded 沌 has a meaning "gather, water ga

• thaumasiotes 1mo ago
  > I admit I had a hard time finding an example. Where did you get the original 'example' of 沌 / 屯 from? Most people prefer to use examples that they have some kind of personal knowledge of. > There are other meanings to it. [沌] Not as many as you might expect. It's (part of) a mythological term referring to the state of the universe before it took the form we can observe today. It has a couple of other metaphorical meanings coming from that, or from traditional sayings related to that. I see that wiktionary lists 沌がる as an alternate spelling of 塞がる "be blocked" [塞 - obstruct / block / plug], which looks like the closest thing we're likely to find to your earlier claim. Obvious problems using this to support your comment are: - There's still no "gathering" or "accumulating" sense. (Nor is there an "obstruct" sense of 屯.) - This is a meaning assigned long after the character came into existence, which means it cannot have informed the construction of the character.
  • matvore 1mo ago
    I learned about 沌 quite a while ago when I studied the first few chapters of Genesis in Japanese (混沌 was used to describe the earth in Gen 1:2) and something jogged my memory when I was looking for examples. The dictionary link I posted had あつまる、水があつまる in the first definition. I don't know if that's a reliable dictionary. Maybe you think it's not? > - This is a meaning assigned long after the character came into existence, which means it > cannot have informed the construction of the character. I don't know anything about which meanings were used first and which were added later, but what you say sounds believable. > - There's still no "gathering" or "accumulating" sense. (Nor is there an "obstruct" sense of 屯.) Let me clarify. Even without the first sense for 沌 in the above dictionary (あつまる、水があつまる) some of the other definitions for 沌 had "gather" included in it conceptually, namely clog and joined together without distinction. This phenomenon we are talking about is called 会意兼形声文字 and this site seems to have a lot of accurate examples: https://okjiten.jp/20-kaiikenkeiseimoji.html#google_vignette https://okjiten.jp/20-kaiikenkeiseimoji.html#google_vignette I confirmed a few, and they seem correct. I thought 界 was the most easily understood example. 介 means being between two things and contributes the pronunciation. 界 means region, span, separate, division.
    • thaumasiotes 1mo ago
      > This phenomenon we are talking about is called 会意兼形声文字 There are no kana in that word, but if you search baidu for it you'll find a total of zero uses. It's not difficult to understand what the phrase means - "a character that is simultaneously 会意 and 形声" - but it's not an existing term. It looks more like a joke, the way English speakers will sometimes talk about "autoantonyms". There is a list of six traditional categories of character construction, and we still understand what five of them mean: 象形 - a character that literally pictures its referent, as 日 depicts the sun or 木 depicts a tree. 指事 - a character that metaphorically pictures its referent, as 刃 indicates the edge of a blade by placing a mark next to 刀 ["knife"], or 本 indicates roots by placing a mark at the bottom of 木 ["tree"]. 会意 - a character whose meaning derives from the interaction of two semantic components, as 明 ["bright"] pictures the sun and the moon, or 休 ["rest"] pictures a man next to a tree. 形声 - a character with one component indicating the meaning and another component indicating the pronunciation. The vast majority of characters are in this class, but we may use the example 河 ["river" or specifically "the Yellow River", today pronounced hé], in which the semantophore is 氵["water"] and the phonophore is 可 [a modal verb having to do with permission or ability, today pronounced kě]. 假借 - a character that is borrowed from some other word (because it shares the same pronunciation). These have tended to be "corrected" over time, but an example would be the tendency in ancient texts to write 女 ["female"] for the word that is today written 汝 ["you"]. (The other category is 转注. We don't know what it means, but we are given an example - it means whatever the relationship between 考 and 老 is.) > I confirmed a few, and they seem correct. Really? Really? --- EDIT - my discussion of 与 is flawed. There is an ancient 与, and it is given as sharing its pronunciation with 與, while 與 is said to be 会意 with 与 as one of the components. 與 could be fairly called "both 会意 and 形声", though 与 can't. --- The first example on the page is 与. This is a simplified form (from 與) and it doesn't carry any phonetic or semantic weight. It's a representation of that bit in the top middle of the older form. I can be sure that the page meant to list the simplified form, though, because it's in the category of "three strokes". ---------------------- Moving to the "four stroke" category, we can see 切 ["cut", today qiē]. This is as clear as they come: it has a phonetic component 七 [today qī], and a semantic component 刀 ["knife"]. There is absolutely no possibility that it could be interpreted as 会意, because the meaning of the phonetic component is "seven". 円 is another simplified form. It means "round" (like a circle). The older form is 圓, which does have two components: the semantic component 囗, and the phonetic component 員. The meaning of the phonetic component is "staff; personnel". I'm not seeing the case for how that contributes to expressing roundness. 攴 ["strike; beat"] is another 形声 character with a phonetic component 卜 and a semantic component 又 ["again" - the connection here isn't obvious to me]. The phonetic component on its own refers to divining the future, a concept unrelated to 攴. (仁 appears to be a fair call. It is identified as a 会意 character for what I assume are good mystical philosophical reasons. But equally it's true that 仁 shares its pronunciation with its lefthand component 人 (and this was also true in the past).) In the "five stroke" category, we find 氷 ["ice"]. This character doesn't have two components and therefore cannot be 会意 or 形声. Today it is more commonly represented as 冰, which does... sort of... have two components. However, it's a weird case, because the component on the left, 冫, is usually understood as the combining form of 冰 itself, making this character infinitely recursive. The ancient form of the character had 仌 on the left, but I haven't been able to determine to my own satisfaction what that signified. As best I've been able to tell, 仌 by itself is now considered an archaic variant of 冰, and it means "ice", making the ancient character self-recursive in the manner of the modern one. 冰 (or rather the older form 仌水) is identified as a 会意 character, and I guess you can see it that way - you have a character meaning "ice" built from components meaning "ice" and "water" - but since it seems to be identical with its own left component I have difficulty calling it 形声. At this point, I really don't see any value in looking further into the page.