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The page for the kanji for ‘test’ uses a squid radical, which doesn’t seem to have been covered before (to my recollection).
Anyone know where the squid radical could be hiding in TF?
I don’t think it is hiding anywhere – looks like Koichi might have created the kanji article, then got disctracted before creating the radical page to go with it. If it existed, it’d be at http://www.textfugu.com/radical/squid/, but I’m just getting a 404 error when I go there.
It doesn’t seem to be a kanji in its own right. The actual word for squid is 烏賊…
Thanks, I will forge on.
Poor old neglected squid…
After more research, it appears to be a radical that lends its reading – けん – to characters rather than any particular meaning. There’s a number of characters which have it, and they all have けん as their on’yomi – for example, 検, 剣 or 険. It’s apparently derived from a Chinese-origin character which looks like the left half of 劍 (but which also doesn’t seem to exist in modern Japanese).
So… don’t worry about squids, just read it as けん?
Cool, good discovery.
Thanks.
I’ve noticed a few kanji that share both radicals and readings (though I can’t bring to mind which ones)… assumed it had some kind of etymology behind it.
Is there a website somewhere with the details? Ideally with lists of words that share features.
I’m sure there is a website somewhere. But yeah, there’s pretty much three kinds of radicals: ones that share their reading, ones that share their meaning, and ones that are either pictograph-based, or just modified from some other radical. Sometimes they overlap.
For example, 日 tends to share its meaning – kanji with the 日 radical (at least when it’s on the left) tend to have a meaning related to time. For example, 時, 曜 or 暇. On the other hand, 方 tends to share its reading (ほう) – such as 放, 訪 or 芳. Once you start getting a feel for which radicals do what, it’s a good way to intuit either the meaning or the reading of a kanji you’ve never seen before.
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