About
The character "馕" entered written Chinese to transcribe the name of a Central Asian flatbread, deriving from a loanword. Its traditional form, "饢", is structured as a phono-semantic compound with the semantic component 食, indicating food, and the phonetic component 襄 providing sound. The simplified form "馕" retains the semantic element in its reduced form 饣, while substituting the phonetic with 囊. Both forms have been used exclusively to denote this bread since their incorporation into the language, with no substantive change in meaning.