Definitions
catfish
Etymology
About
The character 魸 is a highly specialized phono-semantic compound found in classical taxonomy, where it names a particular species of fish, often a catfish. It is composed of the semantic radical 魚 (yú) on the left, indicating an aquatic vertebrate, and the phonetic 夬 (guài/kuài) on the right, a divinatory hexagram symbol that provides the pronunciation. This structure allowed the precise identification of a specific marine or freshwater creature in historical agricultural and zoological texts, with the radical alone conveying the biological category and the phonetic serving only as a sound marker.
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