匠

Meanings

Etymology

Traditionally thought to be an ideogrammic compound (會意 /会意): 匚 (“box”) + 斤 (“axe”) (e.g. Shuowen). In more recent scholarship (e.g. Zhengzhang, 2003; Baxter and Sagart, 2014), an alternative glyph origin has been proposed, suggesting that it is a phono-semantic compound (形聲 /形声, OC *sbaŋs): phonetic 匚 (OC *paŋ) + semantic 斤 (“axe”). Several etymologies have been proposed: * Related to Tibetan བྱང (byang, “skilled”) (Bodman, 1980) or སྤྱང (spyang, “skilful; clever”) (Sagart and Baxter, 2012). These comparisons would require the Old Chinese reconstruction to have a *sb- initial, which is possible if 匚 (OC *paŋ) is considered to be the phonetic component. The Middle Chinese initial would be derived as such: *s.b- > *zb- > *bz- > *dz- (Baxter and Sagart, 2014). * Schuessler (2007), who reconstructs the Old Chinese minimally as *dzaŋh, deems it more likely to be from Mon-Khmer, comparing it to Khmer ចាំង (cang, “to dress; to trim (wood)”) (Schuessler, 2007). * Jacques (2015) proposes another Sino-Tibetan etymology, comparing it to Tibetan མཛངས (mdzangs, “wise; intelligent”), which is derived from བཟང (bzang, “good”). Under this hypothesis, it can be derived from 臧 (OC *[ts]ˤaŋ, “good”), which has been connected to the Tibetan word. He postulates the derivation to consist of the nominalizing circumfix *k- -s and the applicative prefix *N-, yielding *k-N-tsaŋ-s > *k-dzaŋ-s.

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Stroke order

Components

Components from cjk-decomp · MIT

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