Hi guys,
I'm currently in my 300s. Up till now I've been really careful not to use the 'water' primitive to mean 'sea' explicitly in my stories, because I knew 'sea' would have its own Kanji along the way. but then I gave it a search at http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/etp24/...isig-index and it seems that the 'sea' kanji (#461) does not appear anywhere else; In that case, using 'water' to mean 'sea' in stories would be no different then using 十 to mean 'needle', a meaning it gets from 針, right?
I can't see any holes in this logic, but then again, I can't see some 1800 kanjis ahead so what do you think? would it get me in trouble somewhere down the road?
thanks.

Now that you mention it, the water radical does look a lot like a beach shore or something. I can see how using sea would be better than just any kind of water since it will make your stories

Plus the kanji for 海 is pretty easy since it's just 毎 next to it, so I don't think you'd be in danger of forgetting the original if you renamed the radical~

For the record, some people rely a lot on the meaning (of the primitives) to learn kanji; so you could have problems later on while dealing with "fresh water" kanji (irrigate, leak...).

You may use "sea" all the time if you can't help it, but try to keep the water meaning at the same time in a corner of your mind (this is practice for later since kanji usually have different meanings)(see also ball/jewel). It will help you in the long run.

Thanks for the replies. Just to clarify, my intention is not to rename the primitive completely; It's just that in some stories thinking of 'water' as 'sea' makes things much simpler for me.
When Heising introduces the 'water' Kanji, he doesn't say 'as a primitive, you can associate it with water, sea, lake, etc.' and I took that to mean that I shouldn't. But if there's no reason not to, then why not? I find that the more flexible the primitive, the easier it is to come up with memorable and distinct stories..

I use whatever water meaning is useful to refer to that primitive, depending on the kanji. Liquid, water, wet, drops, whatever.

Heisig also refers to is as "drop by drop" on a couple of occasions. The most memorable being the kanji for pond.

edit: okay, not that memorable. I originally linked to ground instead of pond. Oops.

Also keep in mind that the primitive also appears in http://kanji.koohii.com/study/kanji/ocean.

amillerchip Wrote:Also keep in mind that the primitive also appears in http://kanji.koohii.com/study/kanji/ocean.

That's a good point.. luckily, I don't think I'll ever have the urge to associate the 'water' primitive with oceans, simply because oceans are rather exotic for me (while seas are pretty much an everyday matter)..