Hi everyone

I've been following the forums with great interest for some 2 years now. Started studying Japanese only 2 years ago but I've already finished Rtk1 and Rtk2 8 months ago. After that "digestion" period, I've now taken up Rtk 3 around a month ago (Yay!).

I've come as far as # 2264 (托) now and the key word for this one is "receptacle". However I've checked some dictionaries and it's meaning is given rather as "requesting; entrusting with; pretend; hint" etc. I'm a little bit confused, so would anyone have any explanation about the discrepancy?

Thanks

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...7#pid19257

There is this thread about errors in RTK3

(Good work for getting very far!)

The original kanji represented a type of tray.

See, 托子、茶托

You can imagine how over the course of a thousand years or so it also took on meanings of entrusting, to support, etc.

I think there has been some confusion between 托 and 託 over the years, resulting in each being used in place of the other at times. In fact, the simplified Chinese version of 託 is 托.

It seems the original meaning of 托 was the act of stabilizing an object on something else, and the receptacle and entrust meanings grew out of that.

@mizunooto, this character was only mentioned in that thread because "receptacle" was misspelled as "receptable, not because the meaning was wrong.

Thanks for the quick replies!

I have to confess, my confusion stems from the fact that English is not my native language (it being Turkish) and so I had to first clarify the meaning of "receptacle". I looked it up in dictionary.com and it says it means a) a container, b) a part of a flower or c) an electrical contact device. Right after that I queried the kanji itself in a jp-eng dictionary and the definitions in my OP showed up.

Now I'm trying to come up with a story that would be relevant to both the key word and the kanji dictionary definitions. As per the example given by Womacks23 (茶托), do you think I should better imagine a kind of "container" for "receptacle"?

It's not so much a container as it is a flat, portable surface for putting things on. Did you look at Womacks23's words in Google Images? That should give you some idea of what it is:

http://www.google.co.jp/images?q=%E8%8C%...38&bih=662
http://www.google.co.jp/images?um=1&hl=j...i=&aql=&oq=

You might want to think of it as a (tea) saucer.

Thanks JimmySeal, it's much clearer now