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The phono-semantic character 犰 pairs the animal radical 犭 (beast, mammal) on the left with the phonetic 九 on the right, which supplies the pronunciation. Rather than standing as an independent word, 犰 exists solely as a bound morpheme within the disyllabic term 犰狳, meaning armadillo. This character emerged relatively late, coined to transcribe the name of a foreign or newly categorized animal into the Chinese writing system, exemplifying a systematic method for expanding biological vocabulary: a familiar radical indicating the broad taxonomic class is combined with a simple phonetic marker.
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