While searching for the character for V.I.P. (賓, #511), I found that the 一 radical (immediately below the  宀 radical) is not "officially" recognized as one of the components of this character. Or at least, this is how I interpret the fact that two different multi-radical search tools (http://tangorin.com/mr-kanji and http://kanji.sljfaq.org/kanji13/mr.html) both exclude V.I.P./賓 from the remaining available possibilities as soon as one clicks on the 一. In fact the tangorin site (http://tangorin.com/kanji/賓) lists the following as the radicals for 賓: ノ 貝 目 ハ 小 宀, explicitly excluding 一. (This means that if it's a bug, it's not in their MR search tool.)

Does anyone know why 一 is excluded from the radicals that make up V.I.P./賓 ? Is there some rule that I'm missing here?

TIA!

I bet that both the tools you've checked are using the same KANJIDIC data under the hood. That does very occasionally have an error in it, and it looks to me like this is indeed an error.

Trust your eyes. It's in there.

pm215 Wrote:I bet that both the tools you've checked are using the same KANJIDIC data under the hood. That does very occasionally have an error in it, and it looks to me like this is indeed an error.

漢字源 exhibits the same behavior. If you search for うかんむり, いち, and かい, you will see 貯, 殯, and 賽, but none of the other 7 characters that contain 賓. Probably some classification that doesn't consider that line to be the same as いち, but probably not something to worry too much about either.

Thanks for mentioning 漢字源. (I assume that you mean http://www.bitway.ne.jp/gakken/kanjigen/so-net/.) It looks like a useful resource, although, unfortunately it is all in Japanese, which is still well above my reading level at the moment, especially considering that it's a paid service (from what I can tell).

JimmySeal Wrote:Probably some classification that doesn't consider that line to be the same as いち

That was one of the two possible explanations I thought of (plain error being the other one). E.g. that maybe what looks like いち in 賓 is a simplified version of something else. But, if this is the case, I found it interesting that tangorin did not list any other radical that would correspond to this hypothetical いち-like simplification. (BTW, does 漢字源 explicitly list the radicals that it considers to be part of 賓, and if so, does the listing include any radical that could conceivably correspond to the 一 in 賓?)

Which brings up the possibility that there may be elements in a character that are not consider radicals (not even highly simplified versions of radicals).

Why does this matter? At most practical level, it has implications for the use of multi-radical search tools. It means, for example, that one should not give up if, after clicking on a few of the component radicals, one does not see the character one is looking for among the displayed options. One should first try leaving out some of the component radicals, because they may not be true radicals, as seems to be the case of 一 in 賓.

mezbup Wrote:Trust your eyes. It's in there.

(who doesn't trust his eyes???)

JimmySeal Wrote:...but probably not something to worry too much about either.

(who's worried???)

:|

I've dropped Jim Breen an email to ask whether it is an error...

pm215 Wrote:I bet that both the tools you've checked are using the same KANJIDIC data under the hood. That does very occasionally have an error in it, and it looks to me like this is indeed an error.

Thanks for reminding me of KANJIDIC. (I have a hard time keeping track of all the amazingly useful stuff for students of Japanese at Monash!)

I looked into it and, at least the kanjidic.gz and kanjd212.gz files do not include any info on radicals.

But I think your guess about common sources is a good one, as is the guess that this source comes from Monash U.

Thanks again!

Edit: OK, the file kradfile.gz from the Monash site could be the common source for both tools; it includes the line:

賓 : ノ 貝 目 ハ 小 宀

pm215 Wrote:I've dropped Jim Breen an email to ask whether it is an error...

Cool! Thanks! I look forward to his reply. (Based on what JimmySeal wrote about 漢字源, I expect the explanation will be more interesting than a simple error.)

Apparently it was just an accidental omission and will be added. (non-wwwjdic sites will only pick this up if and when they update their datasets, I guess).

pm215 Wrote:Apparently it was just an accidental omission and will be added. (non-wwwjdic sites will only pick this up if and when they update their datasets, I guess).

Good to know. Thanks for the update!

[Katsuo]

JimmySeal Wrote:漢字源 exhibits the same behavior. If you search for うかんむり, いち, and かい, you will see 貯, 殯, and 賽, but none of the other 7 characters that contain 賓. Probably some classification that doesn't consider that line to be the same as いち, but probably not something to worry too much about either.

Also "ceiling + few" derives from "sow". The latter also appears to contain "一"（いち）but a KanjiGen parts search doesn't yield 家, 豚, etc.

Edit: The majority of kanji contain some sort of horizontal line, but which and how many should be classified as "一"（いち)？ Referring to the KanjiGen again, a search gives about 17% of all characters.

JimmySeal Wrote:

pm215 Wrote:I bet that both the tools you've checked are using the same KANJIDIC data under the hood. That does very occasionally have an error in it, and it looks to me like this is indeed an error.

漢字源 exhibits the same behavior. If you search for うかんむり, いち, and かい, you will see 貯, 殯, and 賽, but none of the other 7 characters that contain 賓. Probably some classification that doesn't consider that line to be the same as いち, but probably not something to worry too much about either.

Perhaps you're using an old 漢字源. I get 9 matches, 4 of which contain 賓 (I don't get 賓 itself though).

I have the JIS edition with about 6000 characters. Maybe you have the 12,000 character version.
My version is certainly old, but I doubt that the kanji parts classifications have changed much since I bought it 5 years ago.

Katsuo Wrote:The majority of kanji contain some sort of horizontal line, but which and how many should be classified as "一"（いち)？

My answer would be "the ones where a naive user of a lookup facility is likely to try 一 as a component radical", ie where it's not obviously part of some larger component.

(Are these component-breakdowns ever used for any purpose except a lookup method?)