So, the cactus primitive (lower right part of 聯).
Yeah.
Heisig himself says that it doesn't appear anywhere else in his book, but that it's good to remember for writing old forms, among other things.
I usually try to remember an actual character instead of a made-up primitive, even if knowing that kanji is of negligible utility. It just feels better knowing that at least you actually know what it means, if you should encounter it somewhere. When I encounter a set of primitives that seem like they'd appear together frequently, I look up as many characters as possible via jisho.org's kanji by radicals function, and try to come up with a primitive meaning that is usable in the memorization of the largest possible amount of characters that primitive occurs in.
But when I look up 聯 on jisho.org, the only components listed are the ear and the cocoon, and there are no elements even remotely similar to the cactus primitive in the kanji by radicals lookup. Hence, I can't find any other characters that contain the primitive. Hence, I can't come up with a primitive meaning I'm satisfied with.

So, can any of you guys help me? Ever come across the cactus primitive before? Is it maybe even an obscure proper kanji?

丱 seems to be your cactus. Don't know any other zi/ji containing it though... you can search kanji using handwriting here, by the way.

[Katsuo]

Some random information:
聯 has a variant 聨
丱 "cactus" also appears in:
1. 關 (a variant of 関)
2. 墟 This kanji is rare, but does appear in one reasonably common compound 廃墟 (はいきょ) = ruins, remains. I used "ruins" as a keyword for 墟.

Checking 丱 in various dictionaries, readings are カン and ケン, and it is associated with 1) a child's hairstyle that is split into two at the front and 2) pierced agemaki shells. When "cocoons" are present in the character it suggests several shells are threaded together.

walruz Wrote:Ever come across the cactus primitive before? Is it maybe even an obscure proper kanji?

丱 is a proper character (at least in China, don't know about Japan) that was used to refer to something like this:


丱发 (guàn fā)

KanjiDevourer Wrote:Don't know any other zi/ji containing it though...

As a component, just out of curiosity, in addition to the 關 and 聯 characters that were mentioned which are very common in modern Chinese (Traditional script), 丱 is also used in rare and classical Chinese characters such as ? ? ? ? ? ? ? and ?.