80287
I was looking up the use of the 豆 radical and I noticed something strange in
multiple dictionaries. Of the 60 kanji that use 豆, 59 of them are also said to
use 口. The the 1 that does not is
[鱧](https://jisho.org/search/%E9%B1%A7%20%23kanji). Numerous other kanji
appear to use 豆 in the same way as 鱧, so why is 鱧 an exception?
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2020-08-22T16:58:16.273
80279
2020-08-23T11:51:54.137
7790
question
kanji radicals
Why does 鱧 not contain the 口 radical?
For accuracy purposes, I'll advise you to ignore whatever you've read from
_jisho_ or elsewhere about "radicals". If you wish to use these graphical
primitive parts for mnemonics purposes, that's fine, but since they don't
really have anything to do with the Japanese language, I would classify such
ways of looking at _kanji_ as **opinion-based**. 「口」 isn't functionally in any
of these characters, apart from its appearance as a collection of strokes
written in the shape of 「口」.

* * *

「[鱧]{れい}」 ( _a type of fish_ ) is comprised of semantic 「魚」 ( _fish_ ) and
phonetic 「[豊]{れい}」. It's not a good idea to further try decomposing 「豊」 (and
generally not a good idea to decompose characters at more than a surface-
level), as the results likely won't have anything to do with the meanings or
sounds of 「鱧」 in a direct manner.

「[豊]{れい}」 is part of a [phonetic series of
characters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_series_\(Chinese_characters\)),
but due to some modern changes in the Japanese writing system, the phonetic
nature of this _kanji_ is difficult to get a grasp on, and shows up very
rarely:

  * Japanese uses the shape 「豊」 as a [simplification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai) of 「[豐]{ほう}」, but this is non-orthodox, as 「豊」 and 「豐」 originally represented different [morphemes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme);
  * 「[豊]{れい}」 is the phonetic component of 「[體]{たい}」 ([ _Shinjitai_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai): 「体」);
  * 「[豊]{れい}」 is the phonetic component of 「[禮]{れい}」 ( _Shinjitai_ : 「礼」).

* * *

The following would be better asked in separate questions, as they don't
actually have anything to do with the meanings and sounds of 「鱧」:

  * Why does 「豊」 look like it contains 「豆」?
  * Why does 「豆」 look like it contains 「口」?
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2020-08-23T03:19:06.263
80284
2020-08-23T03:19:06.263
26510
80279
answer
So I downloaded <ftp://ftp.monash.edu/pub/nihongo/kradzip.zip>, unpacked it
and re-encoded all files using `iconv -s -f EUC-JP-MS -t UTF-8 kradfile >
kradfile.utf8.txt` and so on. Yes, this is a somewhat ancient encoding
apparently modified by Microsoft. Gross. When I then search with `rg --color
ansi --line-number --follow -Pi 并 .` for occurrences of 并 I find, among
others, these entries:

```

    平 : 干 并
    屰 : 一 并 屮
    崹 : ｜ 亠 并 冂 冖 山 巾
    嵭 : 亠 并 冖 山 方
    嵰 : ｜ 丶 ノ 并 山 ヨ
    嶒 : ｜ ハ 并 口 山 日
    嶟 : 并 寸 山 酉
    
```

It would look like 并 has been used to symbolize 䒑 which probably has no JIS
code. So that's that.

Now when you look for characters with 豆 then sure enough 鱧 is among them.
Furthermore, all characters that have 豆 also have 并 (meaning 䒑) and 口, except
for 鱧, which lacks it (and it also appears in only one of the two files with
character components):

```

    鱧 : ｜ 魚 田 豆 日 杰
    尌 : 并 十 口 士 寸 豆
    巇 : 并 匕 卜 厂 口 山 戈 虍 豆
    幮 : ｜ 并 冂 十 口 士 寸 巾 广 豆
    愷 : 并 口 山 忙 豆
    憘 : 并 十 口 士 忙 豆
    暟 : 并 口 山 日 曰 豆
    暿 : 一 并 十 口 士 日 豆
    曀 : 并 冖 口 士 日 豆
    梪 : 并 口 木 豆
    
```

Mystery solved, it's just a quirk of the kradfile data that Jisho is sourced
on which has a few bumps. Observe that in the above, 忙 is yet another
surprising replacement character (for 忄 in this case), and you could probably
find many more eastereggs if you were to sift through the data.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-08-23T11:51:54.137
80287
2020-08-23T11:51:54.137
19992
80279
answer