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Iriawan Kamal Thalib (Thalib) wrote:
Basically all of the kanji has the literal and philosphical meaning. Have you guys seen "Hero" (starring Jet Li)? In that movie, there was like 13 ways, or was it more, to write the kanji for "sword" and each has different meaning.
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I can't remember offhand how many kanji for "sword" there are in Japanese, but many of them do have slightly different literal meanings - not surprising since different kanji means that they are actually different words!
The reason why I resist the "bu means stopping the halberd" school of thought is that you run into a lot of non-Japanese speakers who think that "stopping the halberd" is actually the literal linguistic meaning of the character, when that interpretation is, at best, a menomic or metaphorical device.
Best,
Chris