Tuesday, September 23, 2014

0013 友


It’s hard to see, but this is supposed to be two hands acting in the same direction:

.

The meaning is ‘friend, friendship.’ Tomo (or tomodachi, with some hiragana) in Japanese, you in Chinese. Here’s ‘hand’ in its modern form

.

The lower element in today’s kanji,


now means, when written separately, ‘also, again, furthermore, on the other hand,’ but it is said to come from an archaic character for hand,



of which these are two examples.

No comments:

Post a Comment