Radical 138

艮
137 ⾈ ◄	138	► ⾊ 139
Pinyin :	gēn (= limit)
Zhuyin :	ㄍ ㄣ
Hiragana :	う し と ら ushitora
Kanji :	艮 kon, ushitora (= upright)
Hangul :	머무를
Sinocorean :	간 gan (= upright)
Trigram :
Codepoint :	U + 826E
Stroke sequence :

Radical 138 with the meaning " honest , upright" and " border " is one of 29 of the 214 traditional radicals in Chinese writing that are written with six strokes.

With three combinations of characters in Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary , there are very few characters that can be found under this radical in the dictionary. In the Kangxi dictionary , which has 40,000 characters , it is - with just five characters - the rarest of all radicals.

Radical "upright" takes only in the traditional characters - list of traditional radicals consisting of 214 radicals, the 138th position. It can be found in a completely different place in modern abbreviation dictionaries. In the New Chinese-German Dictionary from the People's Republic of China, for example, it is in 184th position.

The character is probably derived from a drawing of legs pointing to the right while the eye looks to the left. From this, some scholars infer the basic meaning of "avoid".

艮 is the seventh of the eight trigrams of the Book of Changes , Yijing (易经), made up of three continuous and interrupted lines superimposed on each other, which are symbols for heaven, earth, thunder, wind, fire, mountains, swamps and lakes. 艮 (gen) means "mountains" here. The corresponding hexagram 52 means “keeping still”.

In ancient texts, nimmt takes on the meaning of “steady, stand still, difficult”. In composite signs it occurs primarily as a sound carrier, as in 哏 (= funny), 茛 (= buttercup), 恳 (= honest, with 心 heart below), 垦 (= make arable), with 土 (= earth below),痕 (= scar), 很 (= very), 狠 (= brutal), 恨 (= hate, with 心 heart on the left). In a slightly modified form, 艮 appears in the left position in the symbol, for example in 即 (= as soon as), 既 (= already).

Not to be confused with 良 (= good) with radical 184食 (= food), which is derived from another original form and also in its variant in the left character position is similar to that of 艮: 郎 (= old official title) or 朗 (= bright, clear). Also, in some compound shapes only the small bar above makes a big difference:踉(= jump) but跟(= heel) and茛(= Ranunculus) but莨(= henbane ).

Character combinations ruled by radical 138

Strokes	character
+ 00	艮
+ 01	良
+ 02	艰
+11	艱

In the Unicode block Kangxi radicals the radical 138 is coded under the code point number 12.169 (U + 2F89).

literature

• Edoardo Fazzioli : Painted Words. 214 Chinese characters - from picture to concept . Marixverlag, Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 3-937715-34-7 , p. 75 .

For detailed references, see List of Traditional Radicals: Literature

Web links

Commons : Radikal 138  - Graphic representations of Radikal 138

• Xiù cai.oai.de (PDF; 1.72 MB) Explanation of Radikal 138 on page 123