Today I read the mnemonics for the character nao3 脑 and was surprised to find that so many people regard the left radical as month and not as flesh as it should be. In the German definition there is the meaning "flesh" not even mentioned and in both the German and English definition it only says "Kangxi radical 74" but no mentioning of radical 130.

Nick posted on June 6th 2010:
"Yes, there is confusion between the original meat radical (⺼, ròu) and the moon radical (月, yuè) which has taken over for it. Not sure if I'll do something to go and transform some of the 月s to ⺼s. "

So I would like to ask, if there is any plan to solve this problem? I know the radicals look the same, but in paper dictionaries the characters are divided into 月 yuè and ⺼ ròu (肉月）characters and I think it would not only be correct to do so here, but also would be easier to remember the characters.

I thought that the meat/month confusion had to do with the evolution of the radical itself in Chinese writing style, not a confusion that originated in Skritter. That is, in modern fonts, it's written as 月 now, isn't it? So if people don't happen to follow the historical etymology in their mnemonics, I personally have no problem with that. (People make up all sorts of crazy mnemonics, which we're not obligated to use.) I personally just try to remember that sometimes "meat" is written 肉 and sometimes it's written 月 and that 月 also means "month".

James

Sorry, a minor correction. I should have said "in modern fonts, it displays as 月 now, doesn't it?" I suppose there may well be people who write it differently by hand, even in simplified script.

I've made changes to include radical number 130 in the definition for various languages, but I haven't added "flesh" to it for other languages. Feel free to submit a correction there, so we can get it in there. The new definitions won't propagate until we refresh all the components, though, which we're planning to wait a while on (since it takes so long to run).

As we still don't have a good way of changing which radical is listed for each character, I'm still leaving it as 月 in decomposition for now.

@jww1066
Yes, it is written 月 and I agree with you, that it does not matter, what kind of mnemonics people make up to remember the characters. The thing I was mainly worried about is that maybe many people won't realize that a whole lot of characters are connected to flesh and not month. I think it is better to know this connection, so whenever you see a character with 月 you could guess, that it may be a body part / organ like 脑，脏， 肝， 胆， 膀， 胱 or meat like 腊肠 etc. On my iPad I use Pleco and there they only listed 26 characters derived from month and 304 derived from flesh/meat.
How do you define modern font? I just tried it out in Word and in the fonts MingLiu and JhengHei it does make a difference. 肝胆 and many other characters change from 月 to ⺼ Strangely enough not all. So in the word 腊肠 only 腊 switches to ⺼...

@Nick
Thank you! I maybe will submit a correction for the German part.

@meihui very interesting, I just tried it in MS Word and got quite different results. Just to confirm that we're talking about the same thing, I tried with these characters:

脑肝胆腊肠明朠

where all but the last two seem to use the "meat" meaning as far as I can see.

In KaiTi and MingLiu, I saw no difference. I don't have JhengHei installed so I couldn't test it. In Arial Unicode MS, only 腊 changed to use the "肉" style (i.e. diagonal lines inside rather than horizontal lines). Now, the way I see it, only 明 and 朠 should use the "moon" meaning, so why should 腊 be the only one to switch? This really looks kind of strange.

James

@jww1066
This is getting weirder. I tried again with the characters you mentioned.
My results:
Arial Unicode MS: only 腊 changes
MingLiu_HKSCS: 肝 and 腊 change
MingLiU, PMingLiU and Microsoft JhengHei: 肝, 胆 and 腊 change
DFKai-SB: 脑, 肝, 胆, 腊 and 肠 change

I hope the confusion will clear up one day and I luck at this radical like this: 朙.

Sorry, typo. "look" not "luck"

@meihui It seems that the font designers are also confused. :) Maybe some experts on simplified characters can clarify the issue for us. I assume you're only interested in simplified?

James

@jww1066
Right now, I am focusing on simplified, but in the long-run I would like to master the traditional characters too. Since I already learnt Japanese, it will be a big mess in my head. ;-) So knowing more about the etymology might make it easier for me. When I have time, I will try to dig a bit deeper in this problem. It somehow bugs me now. A quick search on the internet just brought up quite contradicting views on this topic.

I'm studying both simplified and traditional and it's not that bad, although there are many exceptions to the general patterns, but adding Japanese would probably drive me a little crazy at first. :)

I think one of the advantages to the traditional characters is that they retain more of the etymological history; many of those details have been erased in the simplification process. For example, 发 in simplified can mean "emit" or "hair", but in traditional the two characters are quite different (發 vs. 髮 respectively). There are lots of compounds that use these two.

James

At first I didn't like the simplified characters, but surely they are easier to write by hand than the traditional ones. But I also think that the traditional ones are easier to understand. At least with the Japanese background.

The Japanese Kanji are a mixture of traditional and simplified characters. There are characters in-between like 発 the equivalent of the character 發, so for many characters I need to know three versions... And there are some characters that only exist in Japanese, like this one 畑.

Regarding the 月 and 肉月 I found this interesting article:
http://www.ht88.com/article/article_12962_1.html

According to this article there is a third kind of 月 characters which are based on 舟 like 服 and 朕.

I asked one of my Chinese students if they used mnemonics at school or how they memorized the hanzi. She said that they just learned the characters in batches, so they learned all major characters with the same radical by heart. Normally they didn't use mnemonics. But for 朋 her teacher explained her that it means two animals (i.e. two pieces of meat) together being friends. ;-) But in the dictionary 朋 is in the 月 and not 肉月 section...

Zhongwen agrees that 服 is based on 舟 rather than 月 or 肉. What a mess! Does that mean that the 月 in Skritter's breakdown should include "boat" in its definition along with "month" and "meat"?

http://zhongwen.com/cgi-bin/zipux2.cgi?b5=%AAA

James

Hmph my link got munged. Try http://zhongwen.com/cgi-bin/zipux2.cgi?b5=%AAA

Somehow this link didn't work, but I found the information for 服。 And for 朋 it says "Pictograph of a legendary phoenix-like bird (altered to resemble 月)". In Baidu Baike I found this: http://baike.baidu.com/view/594836.htm
It says that 朋 was first a unit of currency (like five shells are one peng)。 Later the meaning shifted to 同学 (classmate), so in the famous sentence by Confuzius "有朋自远方来，不亦乐乎" it is not "friends" coming from afar but "classmates". In the picture you can also clearly see, that the original version of this character does not resemble the moon at all.

Also 青 has nothing to do with 月 the lower part of this character which looks like 月 actually comes from 丹 a red mineral.

OK, so it looks like in the past the modern component 月 actually had many, many more meanings than we originally thought. Month, meat, boat, phoenix, currency, what else?

I've recently run into a couple of similar cases where the character etymology on YellowBridge and Zhongwen uses an archaic meaning of one of the components. For example, they say that 幸 (fortunate) originally meant "prisoner" or "criminal" and was a pictograph of handcuffs. (It's not clear to me whether there was a different character that meant "fortunate" and they merged, or if the meaning changed over time.) So, if you look up the etymologies of 報 you will see things like "criminal kneeling with hands bound" which make absolutely no sense if you think that 幸 only means "fortunate". But the "criminal" meaning is now archaic, so it wouldn't really make sense for the Skritter guys to add it to their database. Although I have to admit a Classical Chinese version of Skritter would be very cool.

On the other hand I would definitely like to see this kind of relationship fleshed out in the mnemonics. This sort of connection between characters really helps me remember.

James

As far as I understate the entries about 幸 in Zhongwen, the handcuffed person is only one part. The entry says "early death 夭, reversed 干“， well that does sound "lucky". Maybe it is a pardoned prisoner...