理義字: kanji with repeated elements

After learning the character 木/ki/tree in one of their first lessons, all new students of kanji remember that magic moment when they encountered the character for “forest”—森 or mori. How simple! A forest is just a bunch of trees? How obvious! This character is so basic it’s taught in first grade, its twelve strokes the most of any character the kids learn that year. Then of course two trees is a grove: 林/hayashi!

Moving along in your kanji study, you would have run into more and more of these characters with repeated elements—two, three, or even four of them. There’s 炎/honoo/flame (two fires on top of each other!), and 品/shina/parts and things. Crystal is 晶/shō—not three suns, but three sparkling stars. Then there’s everyone’s favorite ha-ha character, three women 姦しい (kashimashii) meaning loud or boisterous.

In terms of names, you may have met a 朋子, or Tomoko, “friendly girl”. Sorry, those are not two moons there; they’re actually two strings threaded though shells. Another repeated character often found in names is 圭 (kei/square jewel), which could be Kiyoshi or, as 圭子, Yoshiko or Takako. This will be on your N1 test.

Let’s not forget 羽 (hane/feather), a case in which the single element is not a character in its own right. Then of course we have 弱 (jaku/weak). In case you were wondering, this character is formed from 弓/yumi/bows with little feathers on them, referring to ceremonial bows which are weaker than regular bows. Got it?

競/kyō/match looks very much like two guys getting ready for a footrace, and that’s actually close to the original derivation.

Of course there is also 㐂, the three lucky sevens, a variant of 喜ぶ/yorokobu/take pleasure.

There are at least two other characters involving repeated elements which unbeknownst to you you see every day: 糸/ito/thread and 虫/mushi/bug. Or, I should say, used to involve repeated elements. Those two characters are actually simplified versions of 絲 and 蟲 (resulting from the post-war 新字体 (shin-jitai/new character form) simplification). The single-element versions of these characters originally meant “bundle of yarn” and a mamushi snake, respectively.

But have you ever wondered why there are so few more complex characters where elements are repeated? There’s 協, referring to cooperation, many (十) strengths (力) gathering, But very few others.

In some cases, characters with repeated elements were simplified after the war in such a way as to remove the repeated elements. Consider 浅い/asai/shallow. Pre-simplification, this was 淺, where the right hand side had two instances of 戈 (hoko/lance), representing water as shallow as two lances laid one on top of the other. Another case is 区 (ku/district), where the repeated 品 inside the old version 區 was simplified away..

But in many cases, in groups of three elements, the two on the bottom were replaced with four dashes. It turns out this was a common simplification used historically in Japan when writing characters by hand—so-called ryakuji (略字)—some of which were then adopted in the official simplified versions. One example is 塁 (rui), used for bases in baseball; this used to be 壘. 轟 is sometimes simplified as 軣, but not being a standard-use kanji this is not official. It means a loud roar (such as from many carts/cars), and is also found in the last name Todoroki. And anyone who has spent much time in Tokyo will be intimately familiar with 渋谷/Shibuya, the fashion mecca whose first character is the chon-chon-chon-chon version of 澁. Finally, we have 摂 (setsu/take), found in compounds like 摂取 (sesshu/ingest). It is a simplified version of 攝. The Chinese never adopted the chon-chon-chon-chon strategy; they simplified this to 摄. (For 壘, they went with 垒).

In Japanese, this type of character is called 理義字/rigiji. The Chinese have their own name, 二疊字 (for two replicated elements), the second character of which is an old version of tatami, itself a repeated character! There are many, many more of these in Chinese!

Your quiz of the day: How do you read the following?

毳毳しい

Why, that would be kebakeba-shii, meaning “flamboyant”, from 毳 (keba, fuzzy or furry).