Did you know there used to be kanji 亖 to describe the number four?

Hello there!

Thank you for watching my videos about the Japanese language as always.

I made a video on memorizing the similar kanji 四 and 匹, then I figured out one interesting thing about it when I googled the kanji 四, so I wanted to share it.

In researching the kanji 四, I found that the kanji for four horizontal bars (亖) was initially used as the number four, like the characters for 一, 二, and 三.

The sound of the kanji 亖 is read as し/shi and 四 originally meant to breathe and breath, which also had the same sound し/shi. So people somehow started using 四 instead of 亖 to describe the number four.

I came up with a tip that 四 looks like an open mouth in my video, but it was not just my imagination that 四 represented the inside of the mouth, but the fact lol

Btw, the mods here thankfully gave a message that I can post about my videos even once a week the other day because my videos are always things that teach you some Japanese language, but I actually don’t feel comfortable posting here every time I upload a video.

I don’t know what kind of videos would be useful to you all, and I don’t know if you notice my videos if I didn’t post them, so I came here to introduce them some times, but this time I decided to not link to it on here 🙂

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