About
The character 谳 (traditional form 讞) is a phono-semantic compound. Its left-side semantic radical 讠 (言) denotes speech, while the right-side component 献 (傳統為 獻) provides the pronunciation. Historically, this character was created to represent formal judicial actions, specifically the act of pronouncing a verdict or deciding a legal case. The speech radical underscores that such judgment is fundamentally a verbal declaration made by an authority.