I was randomly searching for some proverbs on jealousy just so I can smudge some 四字熟語　in this guys face who is so god damn jealous that I have put in effort and have motivation to learn kanji in the manner you all know and love.

So anyway in my search i stumbled across the chinese 妒; "dù,"
which doesn't exist in a bunch of e-dicts i tried searching through, and then I came across the Japanese 妬; "to"
this pops up in RTK3, but took about 0.5 seconds to make a story for .

嫉妒 jí dù
嫉妬 しっと

So the resemblance between these two is remarkable, usually the edicts I use point out discrepancies between "Japanese version" and "Chinese version" etc, but they did not for this character?

One thing to note is that the ancient form of 石 looks nothing like the door radical so when this mistake was made it would have been made relatively late. [And the fact that 石 never really appears on the right]
old form of 石 appearing as a radical




These two forms of 妒 are radically different from each other, the bottom (older?) character features two different components of this character with ?/child.

This is purely for interest purposes it would not serve to help anyone but would be interesting to see nevertheless.

When I look at top picture/kanji, I see a road on the right side leading to a door and the left side is a window on the side of a stone house.

theasianpleaser Wrote:When I look at top picture/kanji, I see a road on the right side leading to a door and the left side is a window on the side of a stone house.

Haha, now I can't unsee it.

I see it as a side view drawing of an elephant. The right side is body and legs. Left side is trunk and eye.

nadiatims Wrote:I see it as a side view drawing of an elephant. The right side is body and legs. Left side is trunk and eye.

Your comment made me think about elephants and now I see it as an elephant mouth as well. The stone primitive is part of an open mouth with a tooth in, the right part is a trunk holding up a toothbrush.

I checked my Han-Viet (Vietnamese Hanzi) dict, and apparently they also used the Chinese-form of that character.

嫉妒 - tật đố (tat^. d+o^')

The Japanese version - 妬, is nowhere to be found, probably 日本製.　Although here it looks like the Vietnamese pronunciation is closer to the Japanese one than the Chinese one.

Anyways, with the elimination of Hanzi characters in Vietnamese, it looks like both meanings of these sounds may have been completely wiped from the language. My dictionary searches don't show the meaning "jealousy" for either tật, or đố, or with any of their combinations.

漢語林　says it's a variant and both mean essentially the same.
And btw. you can find both characters in Chinese and Japanese dictionarie, so seems just like a normal variant to me.

妒 isn't encoded in the Japanese character sets, which is why you can't look it up. If you look up 妬 in a good character dictionary you'll see 妒 listed as an itaiji though. A quick google search does find the character in use on Chinese pages, so it isn't a Japanese variant unless it got re-introduced to the mainland.

omake:
《解字》
形声。「女+音符石(セキ)」で、女性が競争者に負けまいとして真っ赤になって興奮すること。石の上古音は妬(ト·ツ)の音符になりうる音であった。

Like said at least for the Kangorin it's listed as a douji 同字, meaning it's the same character or in other words: a variant.
And fyi it's a paperdictionary.

Did I contradict you?