This kanji. 子. Why is it in words 調子, 様子, 椅子? Aside from when it means child, it’s like it has no inherent meaning and just shows up where it pleases sometimes. Any logical explanation to latch onto?
It’s kind of just an all-purpose word suffix that doesn’t mean much. One of the definitions for 子 in Pleco (Chinese dictionary app) is literally just “[added to some nouns or noun morphemes]”.
It would be better to just ask Google, all of these have already been asked and answered somewhere on the internet. Just type any word you like and follow it by 語源, 由来 or 本来 to get the origin of the word. In the case of 椅子, the 子 means “small” and the whole word means “a small thing to lean on”.
I didn’t look into the others, but for 椅子 at least, it seems to be a loanword from Chinese as opposed to a Japanese word using Chinese characters. The 子 is actually a noun suffix, aka it plays a grammatical function, but 1. it’s fulfilling a role for Chinese grammar and 2. Japanese doesn’t really use kanji for function words like that anyway. But the whole thing got imported into Japanese… I guess similarly to if “adog” became the word for dog in another language.
My experience is that looking for “logical reasons” for why something exists in a language, can be really frustrating.
Languages are not “engineered”. They evolve over long periods of time, and they have all kinds of “junk” in them.
Often we can make more progress if we just learn “what” and we put aside “why”.
Weighing in as a Chinese person, 子 means more than “child”, it may generally refer to anything that is small, or even more generally simply attach itself to nouns (both tangible and non-tangible). To my understanding, it’s more of a rhythm thing. This does not apply to Japanese, but in Chinese each character is always one syllable, but referring to an object with a one syllable name is sometimes awkward in terms of rhythm/sentence cadence.
So, instead of saying “那椅很漂亮” (that chair is pretty), we say “那椅子很漂亮”. The 子 here adds no meaning. We just prefer nouns to have at least 2 syllables instead of just 1.
That meaningless 子 probably then carried over from chinese to japanese.
Hope this helps.
I’ll put it to you this way. Kanji, even though each character represents something, it does not mean that when used in a word that meaning will always apply…you will encounter a ton of Kanji that it make no sense why they are in some words…they just are
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[According to this post,](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAJapanese/comments/rz56dd/why_does_the_kanji_for_chair_%E6%A4%85%E5%AD%90_use_the_%E5%AD%90_kanji/) it has to do with making pronunciation easier
[deleted]
It’s kind of just an all-purpose word suffix that doesn’t mean much. One of the definitions for 子 in Pleco (Chinese dictionary app) is literally just “[added to some nouns or noun morphemes]”.
It would be better to just ask Google, all of these have already been asked and answered somewhere on the internet. Just type any word you like and follow it by 語源, 由来 or 本来 to get the origin of the word. In the case of 椅子, the 子 means “small” and the whole word means “a small thing to lean on”.
I didn’t look into the others, but for 椅子 at least, it seems to be a loanword from Chinese as opposed to a Japanese word using Chinese characters. The 子 is actually a noun suffix, aka it plays a grammatical function, but 1. it’s fulfilling a role for Chinese grammar and 2. Japanese doesn’t really use kanji for function words like that anyway. But the whole thing got imported into Japanese… I guess similarly to if “adog” became the word for dog in another language.
My experience is that looking for “logical reasons” for why something exists in a language, can be really frustrating.
Languages are not “engineered”. They evolve over long periods of time, and they have all kinds of “junk” in them.
Often we can make more progress if we just learn “what” and we put aside “why”.
Weighing in as a Chinese person, 子 means more than “child”, it may generally refer to anything that is small, or even more generally simply attach itself to nouns (both tangible and non-tangible). To my understanding, it’s more of a rhythm thing. This does not apply to Japanese, but in Chinese each character is always one syllable, but referring to an object with a one syllable name is sometimes awkward in terms of rhythm/sentence cadence.
So, instead of saying “那椅很漂亮” (that chair is pretty), we say “那椅子很漂亮”. The 子 here adds no meaning. We just prefer nouns to have at least 2 syllables instead of just 1.
That meaningless 子 probably then carried over from chinese to japanese.
Hope this helps.
I’ll put it to you this way. Kanji, even though each character represents something, it does not mean that when used in a word that meaning will always apply…you will encounter a ton of Kanji that it make no sense why they are in some words…they just are