Hello,
I’m trying to get a grasp on something about japanese and came across a class that lectured about ways to read kanji:
There are groups of kanjis and in one of them, you can have a combination of kanjis to form another.
I realized that the ‘ai’ kanji (愛, love) can be a combination of ‘onna’ (女, woman) and ‘kokoro’ (心, heart) and there’s a third segment on top that i still don’t know what it is.
Woman and heart makes sense to express the idea of love, but what does the third kanji mean?
2 comments
> Originally 㤅, a phono-semantic compound (形聲, OC *qɯːds): phonetic 旡 (OC *kɯds) + semantic 心 (“heart”).
> As early as the Qin dynasty, a meaningless component 夊 (“foot” — Not woman!!!) was added to the bottom of the character, as with some other characters depicting people. Compare 憂 (from 㥑).
> Further corruption turned the original phonetic 旡 into ⿱爫冖.
[Wiktionary](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%84%9B) usually has decent info about kanji etymology
Random fun fact about the 女 kanji, if you lay out the stroke order one by one side by side you’re left with the word くノ一 (kunoichi)which means female ninja.
I’ve always found that quite hilarious and ingenious