480531170

1015
依
I, E, yoru
OBI ; seal . Has 41 ‘person’, and 444
depend, thus
(‘garment’) as phonetic with associated sense
L2
8 strokes
taken as i] ‘draw close, lean on’, giving ‘lean/
depend on’ (Katō, Ogawa), or ii] ‘hide’, giving
IRAIrequest
‘rely on (something) to hide behind’ (Tōdō);
IZENas before
Mizukami lists both interpretations. KJ1970:18-
EKOJIspite, stubbornness
19; OT1968:57; TA1965:699-701.
Mnemonic: THUS, A PERSON DEPENDS ON
CLOTHES
1016
L1
威
I, odosu
authority, threaten
9 strokes
IRYOKUauthority
IGEN dignity
odoshiMONKUthreat
Bronze ; seal . Has ‘woman’ 37, and
476/545 (‘type of battle-ax / halberd’) as
phonetic with associated sense ‘be afraid/
fearful’, giving ‘woman to be held in awe/
respected’, ‘mother-in-law’. (Note the English
slang expression for a mother-in-law, ‘old
battle-ax’.) Later, the sense was generalized
to ‘fear, frightening’, and extended to
‘threat’. Note: Ogawa interprets the phonetic
element slightly differently as , another
graph which refers to another type of battleax.
KJ1970:9-10; MS1995:v1:324-5,532-3;
OT1968:256.
Mnemonic: AUTHORITATIVE WOMAN
THREATENS WITH A BATTLE-AX
1017
L1
為
I, suru, nasu, tame
do, make, purpose,
cause, reason
9 strokes
KŌIaction, act, deed
SEI*reason, cause
shisugiruoverdo
OBI ; seal ; traditional . Has () 1739
‘claw, talon’, (here, ‘hand’), and 540 (‘elephant;
image’), taken in one analysis as phonetic
with associated sense ‘shape, condition’,
giving ‘gesture, make a gesture; imitate’ (Mizukami,
Katō), though the semantic progression
here seems a little forced. Ogawa, alternatively,
takes semantically as ‘elephant’, giving ‘tame,
domesticate’, and Shirakawa also interprets in
similar vein, arguing that elephants would have
been used in ancient times for heavy construction
work such as the building of palaces. Such
an analysis is regarded as inappropriate by
Katō, who treats the meaning ‘make’ as a generalized
sense deriving from ‘make a gesture’.
Schuessler, by contrast, treats ‘make’ (also another
related near-homophone ‘for, on behalf
of, because’) as a near-homophone in early
Chinese of the word for ‘elephant’, and treats
the etymology as not clear. It seems a likelihood
that ‘make’ is a loan usage of the graph
; and the same applies to ‘purpose’, ‘cause’,
and ‘reason’. MS1995:v2:820-21; KJ1970:19;
OT1968:631; AS2007:510; WB1994:60-62. Mnemonically
awkward, but we suggest remembering
by association with 190 ‘bird’.
Mnemonic: DO IT FOR THE PURPOSE OF
MAKING ODD BIRD FROM ELEPHANT
The Remaining 1130 Characters 309