Etymology of 若干

[djwebb2004]

I have never seen a good dictionary of the etymology of Chinese words/characters, eg 文化 and 俱乐部 are both japanese coinages, 刹那 is a borrowing from Sanskrit etc. But it seems to me that 若干 cannot be understood from the 2 characters that were chosen to write it alone. Is this an ancient borrowing? Or were arbritary characters chosen to write this word down? Maybe no one in the modern day knows any more?

[againstwind]

Probably 若干 is a very ancient word which have existed for at least 1700 years in China. Because in the classical canon 礼仪.乡射礼, the famous scholiast 郑玄 Zheng4 Xuan2 who lived from 127A.D. to 200 A.D. wrote:

“右贤于左若干纯若干奇。”

In the 古代汉语词典 by Commercial Press, the 1st edition, page 1338, it quotes 郑玄's words above and says 若干 here means 约数, or rather 'probable number'. This is almost the same to its meaning nowadays.