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I was looking for the meaning of 𡗗 which appears as component of characters in several languages, and I couldnt find any. Having the meaning of a component it makes easier to memorize characters that component is part of. Here they mention it appears in chinese, japanese, korean and vietnamese but it gives no meaning and pronunciation. 𡗗 Wikipedia

Here 𡗗 it says apparently its pronuncation is pěng, but it gives no meaning.

Does this character 𡗗 have a meaning?

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2 Answers 2

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A first reminder:

  • Chinese characters represent Chinese morphemes;
  • In addition to meaning, Chinese morphemes overwhelmingly have one-syllable sounds as a core part of their property;
  • As character components, do not ever disregard that a lot of components only hint at the sound of a Chinese morpheme, and not the meaning.

If you only rely on the meaning of a component when it only hints at sound (and not meaning) in a character, you're going to misunderstand how the character system works. This is true regardless of whether you're studying a Chinese language or some other language which uses Chinese characters (e.g. Japanese).

How does this help with this question? Well, if you have a sound, you can be very sure that the sound is attached to a concrete word or morpheme. In this case, if some resource gives the pronunciation pěng for 「𡗗」, then you have the sound part of a morpheme or word, so you're actually halfway there to finding the meaning.

But again, the meaning of the component might not matter in the character you're studying, so don't go overboard in trying to find meanings of components.

The word that pěng refers to is very likely now written as 「捧」, with the cognate 「奉」 as a more probable candidate for a basic glyph derivation. The glyph evolution sequence for 「奉」 is given below:

西周

奉
散氏盤
集成10176
戰國
璽印
奉
0898
古璽彙編

隸定
𡗗

 

「奉」 (Zhengzhang OC: /*boŋʔ/, to hold something with both hands) was originally made up of semantic 「廾」 (picture of two hands) and phonetic 「丰」 (/*pʰoŋ/).



奉
廾部
說文解字
西漢

奉
春秋事語66
馬王堆帛書


奉

 

An extra hand 「手・扌」 was added later to further emphasise the meaning to hold, and this became the modern 「奉」.


A second reminder: The majority of Chinese characters in use today were invented by the time of the Qín dynasty. Therefore, whatever you see in regular script may be the result of centuries or millennia of graphical corruption, and not the original components.

The following is a table of graphical corruptions of different characters containing components which now all turned into the shape of 「𡗗」 in regular script. DO NOT take regular script components too seriously.

廾 + 丰 + 廾 + 廾 +
奉 萅 舂 泰
奉 萅 舂 泰
奉 萅 舂 泰
奉 春 舂 泰
奉 春 舂 泰

Reference:

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    excellent 👍 from now on, one can refer back to this answer for “don’t fixate on regular script” 😸 Jun 13, 2021 at 1:51
  • Even if a component has to do nothing with the meaning of a particular character, by memorizing that component it makes easier to memorize the caracter. The memory refers to a single piece in different characters, and not to a lot of strokes which you dont recognize as the same, but which are the same in different characters.
    – Pablo
    Jun 13, 2021 at 3:14
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You can click into the page of each character with this component, such as 春, 奉, 泰, etc, to see their glyph origins. Actually they may have several different origins although they all have the shape of 𡗗 now. For instance, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A5%89#Glyph_origin says the above part was phonetic 丰 and was later corrupted to 𡗗. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%B3%B0#Glyph_origin seems to also have a corruption: 大 and (which means both hands) merged into 𡗗.

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