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I'm beginner in Japanese, and I was analysing some kanji. I was noticing the
parts of 燃. I see a dog there, a fire, another fire, and then there is this 夕
with two strokes in the middle instead of one, that apparently, as far as I
could look it up, doesn't actually have a meaning, or does it? If not, is
there many kanji with meaningless parts like this? How does it come to be?
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2016-06-07T02:05:58.520
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kanji radicals
Do all kanji parts have a meaning?
Good question, with an unexpectedly complex answer.

'夕 with two strokes' is indeed a radical you can look up -- in particular it's
the 肉 (meat) radical. Radicals can have different appearances (variants), just
like the two appearances of the fire radical 火 in 燃.

燃 is a radical-phonetic compound made up of the fire radical 火 and the right
hand side 然. In turn, 然 is composed of the fire radical as well as the
components 肉 (meat) and 犬 (dog).

The reason why the fire radical appears here twice is this: the meaning of 然
in Old Chinese really was the same as 燃 (to burn)! Later in the development of
the Chinese writing system, the sound of 然 was borrowed for its present
meaning, and then the original character had the fire radical added to
represent its _original_ meaning.

A similar process, where for a certain character a new meaning comes to
replace the old meaning, and a radical is added to represent the old meaning,
happened to many other characters. One example is 雲, the original form of
which was 云 (which is now used in its borrowed meaning of 'to say').

The original meaning of 然 was "to roast dog meat over a fire", which was
broadened semantically to "to burn". Hopefully it's now clear why there's a 犬
in there.

EDIT:

To answer your general question though: "do all kanji parts have a meaning",
the answer is no. A character can't necessarily be broken down entirely into
semantic "atoms". See [the Wikipedia
article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Principles_of_formation)
on phono-semantic compounds for an example of non-semantic character
components.
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2016-06-07T02:53:07.077
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answer
Good question. Actually I thought about that myself several times and could
not come up with a clear answer. Here I will just try to answer to your
specific case.

If you look up 燃 on some dictionary, such as
[here](http://kanji.jitenon.jp/kanjib/784.html), you will find that it just
reports the radicals (部首) that in this case are 火 and 灬 (both fire).

Anyway, if you look 燃 up on a different dictionary such as _Midori_ you will
see that it actually you get a link to 然 and interestingly it decomposes this
the character in 月、犬、and 灬. And if you look closely it makes sense. The top
left part could indeed be a moon (EDIT: apparently it is actually "meat" and
not moon, they just look the same).

Edit: So at least for this kanji yes, each part has a meaning _apparently_. As
pointed out in another answer it seems that Midori's interpretation is not
even correct though.

I could not find an online version of Midori so I will put a screenshot here:

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/l7jYf.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/l7jYf.png)
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2016-06-07T06:09:28.753
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answer
Yes, not all, but many parts constituting a 漢字 have meaning(s).

If you wish to learn what an individual element constituting 漢字 signifies, I
recommend you read 「常用字解」 written by Dr. Shirakawa Shizuka, published by
Heibonsha, as a handy and instructive manual.

常用字解 explains the origin of 燃 as follows:

> The base of 燃 is 然, which signifies the action of burning (roasting) the
> meat of dog being offered as a sacrifice to the Heavenly God. The 月, a part
> of the character is a simplified form of 肉 (meat).

However, 然 grew to mean 然れども (but, however) side by side to the original
meaning of 「然」 later, and it became necessary for Chinese to differentiate the
usage of 然 from 'however' to "burn' by developing a new character. So, they
added 火 (fire) to the existing 然 as a quick method. The creation of 「燃」 was
made in Hang Dynasty after the 2nd century B.C.

An additional note in response to some of the comments and questions below:

月 when used as a 偏 （the left-hand）and 脚 (bellow part of 漢字) instead of 月 on
its own, it’s called 肉月（にくづき), meaning the letter of 月 representing a part of
body in such a way as 腕 (arm), 肌 (skin), 肺 (lungs), 腹 (abdomen), 胎（womb), 肋
(libs), 腰 (waist)，股 (crotch), 腿 (thigh), 腸 (bowels), 肝 / 胆(liver), 背（back), 胃
(stomach), and 腎（kidney）.
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answer