Radical 51

Radical 51 (U+2F32)
(U+5E72) "oppose, dried"
Pinyin: gān
Bopomofo: ㄍㄢ
Wade–Giles: kan1
Jyutping: gon1
Cantonese Yale: gon1
Hiragana: かん, ほす kan, hosu
Kanji: 干 hosu
Hangul: 방패 banpae
Sino-Korean: 간 gan

Radical 51 ( Unicode U+5E72, pinyin gān meaning "oppose" or "dried") is one of 31 out of the total 214 Kangxi radicals written with three strokes.

There are only nine characters derived from this radical, and some modern dictionaries have discontinued its use as a section header. In such characters that are derived from it, it mostly takes a purely phonetic role, as in "liver".

In origin, the character depicts a kind of fork used as weapon used in hunting or in warfare, or alternatively either a pestle or a shield. It can be traced to the seal script.

In simplified Chinese

As a character (not a radical), has risen to new importance, and even notoriety due to the 20th-century Chinese writing reform. In simplified Chinese, takes the place of a number of other characters with the phonetic value gān or gàn, e.g. of "dry" or "trunk, body", so that may today take a wide variety of meanings.

The high frequency and polysemy of the character poses a serious problem for Chinese translation software. The word gàn "tree trunk; to do" (rarely also "human body"), rendered as in simplified Chinese, acquired the meaning of "to fuck" in Chinese slang. Notoriously, the 2002 edition of the widespread Jinshan Ciba Chinese-to-English dictionary for the Jinshan Kuaiyi translation software rendered every occurrence of as "fuck", resulting in a large number of signs with irritating English translations throughout China, often mistranslating gān "dried" as in 干果 "dried fruit" in supermarkets as "fuck the fruits" or similar.[1]

Derived characters

seal script character
Strokes Characters
+ 0
+ 2
+ 3 幵 并
+ 5 幷 幸
+10

Literature

References

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Radical 51.

External links