Radical 51

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

干
Radical 51 (U+2F32)
干 (U+5E72) "oppose, dried"
Pinyin:gān
Bopomofo:ㄍㄢ
Gwoyeu Romatzyh:gan
Wade–Giles:kan1
Cantonese Yale:gōn
Jyutping:gon1
Pe̍h-ōe-jī:kan
Kana:かん, ほす kan, hosu
Kanji:干 hosu
Hangul:방패 banpae
Sino-Korean:간 gan
Stroke order animation

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 肝 "liver".

In origin, the character depicts a kind of fork used as a 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), 干 has risen to new importance, and even notoriety due to the 20th-century Chinese writing reform. In simplified Chinese, 干 takes the place of a number of other characters with the phonetic value gān or gàn, e.g. of 乾 "dry" or 幹 "trunk, body", so that 干 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 幹 gàn "tree trunk; to do" (rarely also "human body"), rendered as 干 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 干 as "fuck", resulting in a large number of signs with irritating English translations throughout China, often mistranslating 乾 gān "dried" as in 干果 "dried fruit" in supermarkets as "fuck the fruits" or similar.[1]

Derived characters
  • Bronze script character
  • Large Seal Script character
  • Small Seal Script character
StrokesCharacters
+ 0干
+ 2平
+ 3年 幵 并
+ 5幷 幸
+10幹

Literature
  • Fazzioli, Edoardo (1987). Chinese calligraphy : from pictograph to ideogram : the history of 214 essential Chinese/Japanese characters. calligraphy by Rebecca Hon Ko. New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN 0-89659-774-1.
  • Leyi Li: “Tracing the Roots of Chinese Characters: 500 Cases”. Beijing 1993, ISBN 978-7-5619-0204-2
  • Rick Harbaugh, Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary, Yale University Press (1998), ISBN 978-0-9660750-0-7.
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References
  1. Victor Mair, The Etiology and Elaboration of a Flagrant Mistranslation, Language Log, December 2007.

See also
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