Characters meaning “Leveret” (baby rabbit or hare)

[gsteemso]

I found exactly two such characters in the Unihan database. They are 䨲 (U+4A32) and 嬔 (U+5B14). I haven’t been able to learn anything about either character save what is in the Unihan database. Can anyone tell me more about them, or at least where online to look for more information, preferably in English?

[Hofmann]

Not in English, but I found in 康熙字典 about 䨲...

...stuff that gets my post truncated. See for yourself.

About 兔, 爾雅 says

兔，子嬔，其跡迒，絕有力欣。

Edited April 21, 2010 at 02:00 AM by Hofmann
English. Should concentrate when writing.

[slywhisper]

These are two characters that are no longer in use.

You can see the info here.

http://zdic.net/zd/zi2/ZdicE4ZdicA8ZdicB2.htm

http://zdic.net/zd/zi/ZdicE5ZdicACZdic94.htm

[gsteemso]

Thank you both for finding those.

I am considerably embarrassed to admit I have had very limited success in making sense of them, though — I only know English and a bit of French, so I am stuck with machine translation to read the pages you’ve pointed out for me. Automated translators don’t do very well when confronted with the specialized abbreviations and so on in a dictionary, with the inconvenient result that the most useful information I can glean from the whole business is from slywhisper’s comment about the two hanzi not being used any more.

Since my original post I have located a third Unicode character with some relevance: 㝹 (U+3779), meaning hare or small rabbit — but it’s marked as being a “corrupted form.” The mandarin (pinyin) pronunciation is apparently “nóu,” just like 䨲 can be, but I don’t know what the exact implications of that “corrupted” descriptor are. Did someone write it wrongly in a dictionary a thousand years ago, thus misinforming generations of students? How common is it or was it?

For that matter, how common is or were any of the three? How can I find out, very approximately speaking, when and where any of them were in regular use? I first got into this line of inquiry in support of a rather silly creative writing exercise I have been undertaking, the inner workings of which require me to find a Chinese character which would have been used by a moderately literate writer (at some point within the last thirty-six centuries or so) in what is now Qinghai province. Not a very precise requirement, but usage data such as I describe seems hard to come by on the Internet, at least in English translation.

As you can see this matter is of no real import whatsoever, but I have gotten quite curious by this point and am reluctant to just drop it.

Any further thoughts?

Thanks in advance,

G.

[slywhisper]

There's some more information on 㝹 here:

http://zdic.net/zd/zi2/ZdicE3Zdic9DZdicB9.htm

This web page just says that (long long ago) in Jiangdong (a place in ancient China) people call leveret "