Why Nobody Knows What 彁 Means 

The "Kan" in Kanji ultimately comes from the Han River in China, which is why it has a water radical.

Take notes: this would be a really cool way to write out the name of some unknowable eldritch being

That 'Jisc' logo is wrong - it's for a United Kingdom not-for-profit organisation that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education and research and not the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee, FYI

I’m a font designer in Japan. Sometimes designers make mistakes when putting together a letter. These days they get caught when checking for mistakes and the vectors get edited, but in the old days before computer aided design it was much easier for things to slip through the cracks, then all of a sudden - a new kanji has accidentally been invented. Kanji are much easier to design in my opinion because once you make the radicals you can piece them together like a jigsaw, though modification is still needed.

the characters 漢 and 治 both feature the same radical 氵because they originated as names of two ancient rivers. So yes, they are water related, but over the ages they took on more significant meanings that surpassed their original definition

No, that character is just me.

As a Japanese, I’ve never seen those characters. Except when any file breaks in my computer because of unicode and JIS being incompatible

There's a song in Taiko no Tatsujin by LeaF called "彁 (Ka)". It's this insane glitch song with multiple time signatures, almost like a "ghost in the machine", like the ghost letter in its title. Also, the beat map goes completely crazy with beats overlapping each other constantly.

政治 more precisely means “Politics” rather than “government”, with 治 kind of meaning “management”/“solve”/“rule” etc, which is actually related to water too because in very ancient times the leaders are the ones who manage the river, which the community is built upon.

The theory I've always heard is that 彁 was copied from a blurry photocopy of 埼玉自彊会 "Saitama Cooperative Organization" from a 1923 newspaper. I guess thats speculation.

As an asian, I can confirm that we painstakingly search for every kanji one by one in unicode when we text

In our language, Urdu, there is one character that appears in the regular alphabet, is taught in primary school, etc but is only used in the spelling of a single word.

From the analysis of a Vietnamese Nôm scholar, the character 彁 looks like a combination of 弓 and 哥. 弓 mostly stand for a bow, or to strive for something. 哥 is usually used for adressing someone who is male which is older, or same age as you. However he suspects that 哥 is actually the duplication of 可, meaning worthy, or great ambition, or (able to) achive. Duplications is often used in traditional Chinese to exaggerate or emphasize the meaning of the character. So 彁 could means to strive for something unfathomably great, something that is of great meanings, or extreme worth. Do take this with a pinch of salt though.

Hanzi (Chinese Traditional and Simplified), Kanji (Japanese), and Hanja (Korean Han characters) all originate from 5th century Chinese characters. Many characters lost or changed meaning along the way.

Small correction: Kanji are ultimately Chinese characters, and it would be more accurate to say that the Kangxi Dictionary contains 40,000 Chinese Characters and not Kanji, as #1 only a small portion of those characters are used as kanji (and to be honest in normal Chinese communication) and #2 the pronounciation and definitions given in the dictionary are for Chinese and not Japanese.

There's actually a full 51 hiragana and katakana characters. 3 are no longer used in modern Japanese, but do appear in historical tests (and in some fonts); 𛀆/𛄠 (yi), 𛀁/𛄡 (ye), 𛄟/𛄢 (wu). Another 2 of the remaining 48 are almost never used except in specific circumstances and have alternative kana combinations to make the sound instead; ゐ/ヰ (wi), ゑ/ヱ (we). These are known as the gojuon, "the fifty sounds". The 51st kana is ん/ン (n) and was only created in the early 1900s to replace む/ム (mu) in words that make the "u" sound silent when spoken aloud. Edit: And then there's "small kana", but that's an easier situation; smaller versions of the "y" sounds, vowel sounds, and the "tsu" sound.

I think for 99% of population using Kanji, at least half of the ~50,000 Kanji characters are never learnt or seen in their lives. There were popular TV shows in China where teenagers compete each other to pronounce and explain random "fossil" characters. My theory is that people just keep inventing new characters back in the days when they couldn't find one to mean what they had in mind, because there wasn't a widely used dictionary to keep track of those. Then they end up like niche memes that no one understands in a few years.

The Jisc logo in your video is not the same JISC. The one you used is a UK based organisation that provides IT services to academic institutions.

Akenbara 𡚴原 is 5km north of Taga, in Kawachi, in the mountains on the east of the lake.

Even Jisho has these listed as "(phantom kanji)". Every day I get more and more fascinated by these characters, even if I still can't read most words.

Actually one of the most interesting videos you all have put out in a minute.

Can't wait for LeaF's 11 songs for the other characters.

0:04 as a verified Chinese person, I only know one of the characters mean

the pronunciation of 彁 in Chinese is "ge", which be used in the ancient books of Han Dynasty like:《後漢書·張衡列傳》屑瑤繠以為彁兮，巩白水以為漿。 or: 《通典·乘勝》:至高壁嶺，總管劉弘執馬而諫曰：「彁糧已竭，士卒疲頓，願且停營，待兵糧咸集，而後決戰。」 So why did you guys say this Kanji is meaningless?

The oldest one of the Japanese written langauge evolved from Traditional Chinese. They even look the same and have similar meanings. This effect orginates from the 华夏文化圈(chinese culture circle), where chinese culture got exported to other countries around it during ancient times (as China was very powerful and influential in East Asia, esp during the Tang and Song dynasties).

The original meanings of the words "漢" and 跟"治" are strongly related to water. "漢" originally meant the Milky Way, but this word was used by Liu Bang as the name of the country. "治" originally meant Hydraulic engineering. Later, the meaning was expanded, and its modern meaning is management.

JIS = Japanese Industrial Standard C/X = Generation/iteration xxxx(the numbers) = the version

Props to the writers on this one for not padding out the video with unhelpful or unrepresentative kanji examples to appear more knowledgeable about the writing system. This was pretty good. Yall have done better than like 99% of the channels out there who have made videos about kanji with zero clue what they're talking about

@3:05 Nope, there are 4 levels of JIS kanji! The English Wikipedia article says 2, but the Japanese one has all 4.

2:15 sam says 46 katakana characters but 47 are shown on screen, also moraic n is missing

There is a fundamental mistake in the explanation : You only look at the Japanese side of the story, and totally forget that the "Sinograms" or Chinese Characters are used in Simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Japanese and even Korean To summerize, I worked 15 years ago on how to display "Sinograms" on mobile fone, and managed to have a paper copy of the Unicode characters list, from 0x0000 to 0xFFFF. The whole book is more thick than a Chinese dictionary.... So the Sinograms part runs from 0x4E00 to 0x9FFF ( 20 992 Possible characters) and it pretends to encode ALL Sinograms, and also "Japanese / Korean own creation" in it, so that a Full Unicode compatible font can display full Chinese, Japanese and Korean text (I will call it CJK to simplify) So, if one particular character exist in ALL CJK languages, than it will get one common code. Example 0x4E00 is "一" meaning "one" in all three CJK language, and has the same meaning. But some time a characters has the same meaning in ALL CJK languages, but has some graphical difference (due to simplification or local practice, sometime it is very subtile), it still use different code. A very good example is the character meaning "To Say" 0x8AAA "說", this is the Trad. Chinese form, for simp. Chinese it is simplified as 0x8BF4 "说" by reducing the "Speak" radical on the left, and in Japanese it is 0x8AAC "説" as the two stroke on the top right corner goes inward in stead of outward One last category is Japanese / Korean local variant, and the best example is the character "Dragon" : If you start with the Japanese JIS standard, you will get 0x7ADC "竜", this is the Japanese style simplification of the Trad Chinese it is 0x9F8D "龍", and some old Japanese people may know that. but the Mainland Chinasimplification 0x9F99 "龙" is totally unknown to Japanese people. All this to say that the 12 characters you listed are of 90% chance obsolete or rarely use old Chinese characters, or use only in some historical people name, like the last character of the 1st row is part of the name of a lady in Chinese mythology, Chang Er "嫦娥" , who fleed to the moon after drinking an immortal elixir. As the story is not know in Japan, no reason the JIS encode this 2 characters. Another fun fact is the whole Sinograms area in the Unicode is ordered in the old Chinese dictionary way: by the number if strock of the radical in traditional Chinese, then the number of stokes of the remaining part. Now a day (not much) young people know how to find a word in a paper Chinese dictionary :)

The second character from the left in the bottom row is a Chinese character that only exists when talking about the extra month that sometimes gets inserted into the lunar calendar - when you add the extra month you just repeat one of the months and add that symbol. When researching the Chinese Lunar Calendar I asked several Chinese people what the character was and they had no idea. Took quite a lot of internet digging but then I figured it out! Anyway it’s probably a holdover from when Kanji were adopter from Chinese.

The logo used for Jisc in this video is for a UK higher education organisation, not the Japanese industrial standards Committee.

Bow brother, perhaps archery assistant

Space Battleship Yamato introduced a character called 玲 by the fact that nobody would get her name right. 玲 would usually be read Rei, as many characters with 令 in them are. So everyone assumes that's her name. But it turns out that her name is actually read Akira because screw you. It also has the extremely useful meaning of "sound of gemstones".

The element 哥 is most likely meant to be read phonetically as "ka" (Mandarin: "ge"), as its literal meaning "elder brother" is virtually never employed for constructing new characters. And the element 弓 is obviously the radical "bow", used for archery-related words. So the meaning could be something like an archery-related sound effect, either "kaa..." (creaking of string being pulled) or "ka!" (twang of arrow let loose). But of course, Japanese manga has probably already assigned stock sound effects to these actions, so we'd need to find some aspect of the archery process that does not yet have an assigned sound.

Akenbara is a neighborhood in the Kawaguchi section of Taga, Shiga-Ken. It's hard to find on maps since it is not a town or a village.

After the explanation of the one character, I was hoping we'd hear about what mistakes led to all the other "ghost" kanji. I guess I'll have to look it up myself.

Yay another random character to scare my friends with :D

The character "治" (zhì) in "政治" (zhèngzhì), meaning government, originally means "to stop a flood." The ability to stop a flood signifies the capacity to organize a large group of people to work together on a project, hence the connotation of governance. The first king of the Xia Dynasty is said to be an engineer who stopped the Yellow River from flooding, as recounted in the famous tale of 大禹治水 (Dà Yǔ Zhì Shuǐ). The character "漢" (hàn) means Chinese because the Han Dynasty is considered the golden era of ancient China. The Han Dynasty was named after the Han River (漢江, Hàn Jiāng), which was in turn named after the Milky Way (星漢/河漢, Xīng Hàn/Hé Hàn), a "river in the sky." Therefore, both of these characters originally have meanings related to water.💦

Talking about Kanji without mentioning its Chinese origin is wild when Kanji literally means "Han Characters" thus "Chinese characters"

Its worth noting that the JIS standard even misses a bunch. Adobe-Japan1-7 (they defacto font standard), includes about 14644 kanji, over double the JIS X 0213 standard. Including characters like 髙 which is fairly common in names.

What's interesting is how number 8 looks to me (a non Japanese person) a lot like the symbol for open/closed/locked/unlocked that a lot of Japanese doors have on it.

Macauley Culkin 😂

Xiang Yu (項羽) took down the Qin dynasty (秦朝) more than 2000 years ago divided the terriroty of Qin into 4 states (諸侯國). One of them is Han State (漢國) which was named after the Han Rive (漢水) and was led by Liu Bang (劉邦) who in turn defeated Xiang Yu and established the Han Dynasty (漢朝). The Han Dynasty was so powerful that even after the fall of the dynasty the Chinese people then still calls themselves Han People (漢人) and the characters of the Chinese language was subquently called Hanzi (漢字) or Kanji (漢字) in Japanese. Also the og meaning of Han 漢 is milkyway and milkyway in chinese methology is usually refered as a giant silver river (銀河) in the sky, hence the water radical.

4:10 this is false for Japanese, Chinese and Korean, look up unicode CJK unification where they tried to combine characters that they though were the same leading to much anger from Japanese whose characters got replaced by similar but different Chinese ones. This is reason why Japanese resisted unicode for so long and to this day have lower unicode use than most developed countries

I hereby define that character, because it has the radicals for oneself and song, to mean bad karaoke music.

1:57 from the Chinese I know, I'm pretty sure that means politics instead of government.

These are the HAI videos I subscribe for😄

But what does ツ mean?

I think the best example of the backwards compatibility of Unicode with the Japanese Industrial Standard encoding schemes is the inclusion of the JIS symbol itself: 〄

The examples you gave in 2:00 are actually consistant, those characters all origionally refer to something water-related. 治 in 政治 origionally refers to river control, in modern Chinese it just means management. 漢 origionally refers to the milky way (some say it refers to the Han river). And the Chinese word for the milky way is is 银河, which literally translates to "silver river". Today it usually refers to the Han ethinicty

Ah yes, my favorite LeaF song! It's called... uhhhhh.... well..... hmmmmmm...

just noticed an error, your using the logo for the academic network in the UK the Joint Information Systems Committee instead of the one for the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee

The water radical in kan comes from a name of a river, it gives name to the han dynasty as a dynasty of kings from the ethnicity from the area of the river han, the chinese "chinese" ethnicity is han, and kanji is basically han characters.

Clickbait, this video was at least two-thirds as interesting!

"If you know it, you know it. And if you don't, you don't." Great quote man, great quote 👏

IIRC there's a related phenomenon of ghost characters that I don't remember the name, but it's basically characters that we only have one example of usage, i.e. there's only one source where we could find it, and it appears there only once. We can sort of understand them by context, but we don't know for sure.

1:59 the 漢 in 漢字 does have association with water, it's name after Hanshui, a river in China

Deprecated characters could probably be used to make custom symbols in a font for a game or something.

This seems like a great chance for someone to seize the character for their own and add meaning to it

When I wss in Japan, we used to make fun of "uso-ji" 嘘字 (literally fake characters), like extremely complex with 100+ strokes, and we knew: they are not real XD

Actually the water radical in 漢 is easy to explain. The original meaning of 漢 is the name of a river, the Han river, located in central China, and the surrounding land was then called 漢中, and the guy who ruled that land was called 漢王 (the lord of Han). 劉邦(Liu Bang) became the lord of Han in 206 BCE, and later conquer the whole China and became the new emperor in 202 BCE. He named his regime over his old fief, 漢朝 (Han Dynasty), which became the first golden age of Chinese history, mirroring the Roman Empire on the other side of the continent at the same time. Sine the Han Dynasty, the Chinese people start referring themselves as 漢人(Han people, or Han Chinese), and all their stuff as Han-something. And that's how the name 漢字(Han zi) came to be, and Kanji is just the Japanese pronunciation. So yeah, that's how the word for Kanji is related to water.

7:15 is that a Jojo reference?

I'm so thankful for the Phoenicians

The mystery kanji character means jojo worm 🤣

This is so fascinating! Especially the photocopying part.

A great video but it still bugs me when you referred to Chinese characters as Kanji 5:55. It’s like go to UK and say “hey I’m glad you guys are using American letters too”

Hi Sam! Big shoutouts to Amy for 彁. She deserves a raise!

hey these kanji are actually chinese characters give us the credit we deserve

This is why I love chinese characters. It feels much more like a rabbit hole than other writing systems, the fact that there's probably STILL thousands of unknown characters ready to be discovered is exhillarating! I look at it like a secret entrance to another world of linguistics :>

Of all the channels I watch, this was one of the LAST ones I expected to find a Jojo reference!

A lot of them are obscure characters that aren't really used anymore or corruptions of existing characters. The weird bow song fella seems to be read as ka in Japanese,but the only thing I gathered is that LeaF made a song filled with glitches and tempo changes and named it with the character. And if you're curious,yes,this reading is real and not something randomly assigned

"Kanji" is only called "Kanji" when its Japanese, otherwise its Chinese characters or "Hanzi", that Chinese dictionary lists Hanzi, not Kanji.

Brilliant idea for a tattoo to confuse locals as a tourist.

Appreciate your authenticity, keep being real

3:58 well in theory at least

The fifth character on the top at 4:58 looks like "virtue".

I don't know why it's so funny but this is what ChatGPT said: The text in the image is in Chinese and reads: “麦翘昕栖蜓炳陲圉聊搅焰喋” However, this appears to be a random string of characters and doesn't form a coherent sentence or phrase in Chinese. It might be a result of a translation error or some kind of encoding issue. If your coworker meant to send something specific, it might be worth asking them to resend or clarify the context.

Kanji is old because it came from our Chinese language. In Simplified Chinese, it's 汉语 (hànzì). In traditional Chinese, it's 漢字 (hànzì). 漢字 (hànzì) means "Chinese characters" in English. It specifically refers to the logographic characters used in the writing systems of the Chinese language and its derivatives. Each 漢字 typically represents a morpheme or a unit of meaning, and they are used in writing across various East Asian languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. The strokes and structures of 漢字 are intricate and hold significant cultural and linguistic importance in East Asia. Historically, 漢字 (hànzì), or Chinese characters, signify several important aspects: 1. Cultural Heritage: 漢字 have been used for thousands of years in China and neighboring countries. They carry a rich cultural heritage, representing the history, literature, and traditions of East Asian civilizations. 2. Unified Writing System: 漢字 historically provided a unified writing system across regions with diverse spoken languages in East Asia. This facilitated communication and cultural exchange among different ethnic groups. 3. Scholarly Tradition: The mastery of 漢字 was traditionally a mark of education and literacy in East Asian societies. Knowledge of 漢字 was essential for accessing classical texts, philosophy, and administrative documents. 4. Artistic Expression: The calligraphy of 漢字 has been considered an art form in itself, with skilled calligraphers admired for their mastery of brush strokes and artistic expression. 5. International Influence: 漢字 have influenced the writing systems of neighboring countries such as Japan (kanji), Korea (hanja), and Vietnam (Hán tự). This influence extends to cultural practices, literature, and even modern technological advancements. 6. Evolution and Adaptations: Over time, 漢字 have evolved in form and usage, reflecting changes in language, society, and technological advancements. Despite adaptations and simplifications (as seen in simplified Chinese characters), the fundamental structure and historical significance of 漢字 remain deeply rooted in East Asian cultures. Overall, 漢字 historically signifies a profound cultural, linguistic, and artistic legacy that continues to shape East Asian societies and influence global perceptions of Asian heritage.

Strange how that exists, already watched it on nebula lol.

...the second one from the right in the bottom row is just Cthulu flipping the bird

em effer just made a whole comprehensive overview of the japanese writing system to talk about this one kanji character

According to Kanji Recognizer ... 妛 - Ugly (みにくい) 挧 - Japanese Horse Chestnut (とち) 暃 - Be separated (ヒ) 椦 - Wickerwork (まげもの ケン) 槞 - Cage (ロウ) 蟐 - Mantis, Toad (もみ) 袮 - Ancestral Shrine, Embroidery (チ デイ ネ) 閠 - Illegitimate Throne, Intercalation (うるう) 駲 - Horse's Buttocks (シュウ ジュン) 墸 - Hesitate (チョ) 壥 - Fine Residence, Shop, Store (テン) 彁 - "No known meaning; S&H uses jabberwocky words" (カ セイ)

very funny to hear a chinese language dictionary being described as containing thousands "kanji", the japanese word for chinese characters. also why are there no comments on nebula?

When I saw 閠 I thought of those pieces of track that marble runs sometimes have with a lever to let marbles through when you want to start a race.

waiting for this channel to discover 変体仮名 (not writing the english transliteration because it will probably get flagged by youtube lol)

kanji=汉字=the character of Han people. Han people are a group of people originated from a river in china. The name of that river? You guessed it! Han! now you know why there is a water radical in the word Kanji. :) similarly in 治, this character originally meant to control the flood (大禹治水）. Again actually the water radicals make sense there. There has been extensive discussion on Chinese Quora (Zhihu) whether any chinese character with a water radical means something related to water. The answer is loosely yes, pretty much all chinese characters with a water radical originally meant something loosely related to water.

Did this dude just sneak a Jojo reference?

袮 is very much a thing in Chinese. It's the "you" for addressing deities in prayers

@1:58 that term 政治 means “politics” instead of government. The Kanji for government is 政府

That pride and prejudice ref was a deep pull

First I thought, "Why doesn't Japanese just make it simpler?" Then I remembered I speak English and use the metric system...

Kanji's first character 漢 means Han river. Which eventually got the meaning of the Han-people as well.

Did you seriously call Chinese characters in a Chinese dictionary "kanji"? And then not even mention that kanji is literally "Chinese characters"? 🤡

Calling Chinese characters Kanji. Sam just lost 69420 social credits.

wow i got your video seconds after upload

This reminds me of how Taiwanese people use the character 水 (water) as texting slang for 媠 (beautiful) because, while 媠 is the correct character for the common word for “beautiful” in Hokkien dialects, it hasn’t been used in Mandarin writings in centuries. Because the characters and keyboards were all built for Mandarin, it’s really hard to easily type 媠, but it’s really easy to type 水, which happens to have similar pronunciation in Hokkien

It's so weird to hear someone pronounce the "r" sound in Japanese as if it was the English "r". Everyone else who talks about the Japanese langauge on RU-vid says it correctly.

As a Norwegian, I'm genuinely curious why you have norwegian showing up in google translate