Radical 51 or radical dry (干部) meaning "oppose" or "dried" is one of 31 out of the total 214 Kangxi radicals written with three strokes.
There are only nine characters derived from this radical, and some modern dictionaries have discontinued its use as a section header. In such characters that comprise 干 as a component, it mostly takes a purely phonetic role, as in 肝 "liver" (which falls under radical 130 肉 "meat").
As a character (not a radical), 干 has risen to new importance, and even notoriety due to the 20th-century Chinese writing reform. In simplified Chinese, 干 takes the place of a number of other characters with the phonetic value gān or gàn, e.g. of 乾 "dry" or 幹 "trunk, body", so that 干 may today take a wide variety of meanings.
The high frequency and polysemy of the character poses a serious problem for Chinese translation software. The word 幹gàn "tree trunk; to do" (rarely also "human body"), rendered as 干 in simplified Chinese, acquired the meaning of "to fuck" in Chinese slang.
Notoriously, the 2002 edition of the widespread Jinshan Ciba Chinese-to-English dictionary for the Jinshan Kuaiyi translation software rendered every occurrence of 干 as "fuck", resulting in a large number of signs with irritating English translations throughout China, often mistranslating 乾gān "dried" as in 干果 "dried fruit" in supermarkets as "fuck the fruits" or similar.[1]
Sinogram
The radical is also used as an independent Chinese character. It is one of the Kyōiku kanji or Kanji taught in elementary school in Japan.[2] It is a fifth grade kanji.[2]
Fazzioli, Edoardo (1987). Chinese calligraphy : from pictograph to ideogram: the history of 214 essential Chinese/Japanese characters. calligraphy by Rebecca Hon Ko. New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN0-89659-774-1.
Leyi Li: "Tracing the Roots of Chinese Characters: 500 Cases". Beijing 1993, ISBN978-7-5619-0204-2
Rick Harbaugh, Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary, Yale University Press (1998), ISBN978-0-9660750-0-7.[1]
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Radical 051-0.
GF 0011-2009 Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components prescribes 201 principle indexing components and 100 associated indexing components (in brackets) used in Simplified Chinese. Not all associated indexing components are listed above.
