Comment by thaumasiotes
7 hours ago
> I admit I had a hard time finding an example.
Where did you get the original 'example' of 沌 / 屯 from? Most people prefer to use examples that they have some kind of personal knowledge of.
> There are other meanings to it. [沌]
Not as many as you might expect. It's (part of) a mythological term referring to the state of the universe before it took the form we can observe today. It has a couple of other metaphorical meanings coming from that, or from traditional sayings related to that.
I see that wiktionary lists 沌がる as an alternate spelling of 塞がる "be blocked" [塞 - obstruct / block / plug], which looks like the closest thing we're likely to find to your earlier claim. Obvious problems using this to support your comment are:
- There's still no "gathering" or "accumulating" sense. (Nor is there an "obstruct" sense of 屯.)
- This is a meaning assigned long after the character came into existence, which means it cannot have informed the construction of the character.
I learned about 沌 quite a while ago when I studied the first few chapters of Genesis in Japanese (混沌 was used to describe the earth in Gen 1:2) and something jogged my memory when I was looking for examples.
The dictionary link I posted had あつまる、水があつまる in the first definition. I don't know if that's a reliable dictionary. Maybe you think it's not?
> - This is a meaning assigned long after the character came into existence, which means it > cannot have informed the construction of the character.
I don't know anything about which meanings were used first and which were added later, but what you say sounds believable.
> - There's still no "gathering" or "accumulating" sense. (Nor is there an "obstruct" sense of 屯.)
Let me clarify. Even without the first sense for 沌 in the above dictionary (あつまる、水があつまる) some of the other definitions for 沌 had "gather" included in it conceptually, namely clog and joined together without distinction.
This phenomenon we are talking about is called 会意兼形声文字 and this site seems to have a lot of accurate examples: https://okjiten.jp/20-kaiikenkeiseimoji.html#google_vignette
I confirmed a few, and they seem correct. I thought 界 was the most easily understood example. 介 means being between two things and contributes the pronunciation. 界 means region, span, separate, division.