Is the component in 尔 from 刀 or 勹?

[lukey296]

as well as the characters 次，象，解, etc.

 

Pleco is giving me mixed messages on this one. Says it's called "dao1" but from the component "勹". I also seem to remember Heisig referred to it as coming from 勹

 

I was sure it was from 勹 but now I've just seen somebody teach it online as being from 刀. It would help me out if someone could tell me for sure.

 

Cheers!

[OneEye]

In 尔? Neither. In 欠 (and 次, etc.)? Neither. Not in 象 either.

 

I actually wrote a short article about 尔 on Quora a while back. The question was, "Why does the Chinese character for "you" (你) have the character for "small" (小) in it?" Different question from yours, but it stems from the same misunderstanding about how characters work. Here's my response (irrelevant bits omitted):

 

 

It's futile to cut up characters into random components based on their surface-level structure, because that's going to obscure what's really going on with the character.

Although it may bear graphical similarity to the bottom of 尔, 小 is not part of this character whatsoever. 尔 was originally a cursive form [草書 cǎoshū] of 爾, which was then adopted into regular script (楷書 kǎishū) through a process called 草書楷化 (which you can translate as "regularization/kai-ification of cursive"). That's a really important process to understand if you want to know how characters get simplified. Many characters and components are simplified in this way, like 訁->讠, 學->学, etc.

...

The point of all this is, as I said, that you can't just slice and dice characters at will, assign each "component" a meaning based on its colloquial name, and hope to derive some sort of meaning from it all (unfortunately there are far too many books out there that try to do exactly that, much to the learner's detriment). It simply doesn't work like that. You need to figure out what the functional components are in each character and how they function. For more on this, check out these two articles:

What is Etymology and Is it Useful for Learning Chinese Characters? (Part 1)
What is Etymology and Is it Useful for Learning Chinese Characters? (Part 2)

 

 

The bolded sentences are crucial. 尔 is a component in and of itself—it isn't "composed" of any other components, despite the fact that it bears a superficial similarity to them. Same for 欠 (originally a picture of a person with an open mouth) and 象 (originally a picture of an elephant).

 

In 解, however, it is a 刀. The character originally meant "to clip/cut a bull's horn." The connection to its modern meaning "to divide, to separate, to remove, etc." should be fairly apparent.

[lukey296]

Just read your articles and you clearly know your stuff! 

 

I'm developing an online course at the moment and I'm using aspects of the heisig method, giving every character component an associated image to easily make mnemonics. The general philosophy is, as long as you can think of an image that helps you remember vividly, then it doesn't really matter what that image is. However I'm also using real etymology of the characters to aid memorization (e.g. 不 meaning "root" - the part you really don't want), my attitude to which is summed up well in your article:

 

 

 

(From part 2): As far as character learning, knowing the comprehensive story is probably not very helpful, unless you are already a paleographer. However, a simplified, condensed version of that story that emphasizes the important nodes of a character’s evolution, explained in everyday language can be both helpful and interesting to some people.

 

You're right, looking at etymology won't help with everyone for every character, but it can still be a powerful learning tool.

 

In the situation of 你/尔, even though the component isn't meant to be 刀 or 勹, I'll still associate one of them with the component to make it easier tfor my students to remember characters at the beginner stage. However, I still think that learning the etymology of a character can make remembering characters easy and interesting, where appropriate.

 

Thanks for the great post. You have a new follower!

[lips]

The radical of 尔 is 小.  The top part is not a radical, it's just a short 撇 「丿」and a 橫鈎 「乛」.  As OneEye said above, 尔 was the caoshu 草書 and xingcao 行草 form of 爾.  It actually originated from the top part of 爾, and can be written as 尒 or 尓, both reflect better the origin of the character.  尔/尒/尓 were already used as simplified forms of 爾 more than two thousand years ago.

 

BTW 欠 is a radical by itself.

[OneEye]

Sure, but radicals are only used for looking up characters in dictionaries. They have nothing to do with the etymology of the character.

[lips]

I wasn't disagreeing with you.  尔 is a good example.  One uses the radical 小 to look up 尔, but 尔 originated as the top part of 爾, and has nothing to do with the character 小.

[lips]

If I remember correctly, 爾、欠、 解 are all pictographs.  The 刀 in  解 is the top right part, the top left part is part of 角，which is a pictograph by itself.