I just got to the "silver" primitive and was wondering what it really means. In RTK it says that its more trouble to hunt out than its worth and that its better to just learn it, but I am curious.
Thanks

oh wait I just ran across this: 艮 【ごん】 (n) gen (one of the trigrams of the I Ching: mountain, northeast). I also saw something saying it means "good."

Good has a drop on top 良.

It represents a person with their eyes facing backwards, and the original meaning is "to avert one's eyes."

JimmySeal Wrote:It represents a person with their eyes facing backwards, and the original meaning is "to avert one's eyes."

T-1000?

Great on another level now.

vosmiura Wrote:Good has a drop on top 良.

yeah i know, but in the program "rikaichan" it says that it means good (without the drop)

Rikai-chan uses the EDICT dictionary file which has countless errors in it. However, I don't know if that is one of them.

[ファブリス]

To be fair EDICT lists "good radical" as one meaning for the radical when it appears as a kanji on its own, which is not the same as "good". Kanji Learner's Dictionary does not reference this radical as a stand-alone kanji (i.e. 艮 ).

Etymological meaning is what JimmySeal said apparently, you can find such meanings on http://www.zhongwen.com/ for example (try search on "radical").

Maybe that's a good example where the etymological meaning doesn't help

interesting site faburisu

I recently splashed out on The Kanji Dictionary by Spahn and Hadamitzky. It claims to have over 5900 characters (7000+ including variants) as well as 47 000 compounds. It wasn't cheap, but it's a great resource and has an entry for 艮: GON, one of eight hakke divination signs.
I'll leave it to someone else to find out what a hakke divination sign actually is.

[Katsuo]

naniwa Wrote:I'll leave it to someone else to find out what a hakke divination sign actually is

Japanese
English

Edit: testing the above Japanese link, it works for me in Firefox but not in Safari. Not sure why. Something to do with the Japanese in the URL I imagine (http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/八卦).

sutebun Wrote:T-1000?

Looks like someone's been overdoing it with the eyedrops.