descendants; ancestry; fringe
English · descendants; ancestry; fringe
descendants, offspring
- 他是华裔美国人。Tā shì huáyì měiguórén.He is a Chinese American (of Chinese descent).
- 追溯后裔zhuīsù hòuyìto trace descendants/posterity
Topology: Top-bottom · Strokes: 13 strokes
Writing Balance Rule: Keep the top structure compact and let the bottom components (衣) spread out evenly, maintaining a stable vertical centerline.
Radical 衣 · Clothes / Garment Radical (Clothing, fabric, robes)
Semantic Clue (形旁): 衣 (Indicates clothing fringes, trailing robes, and by extension, trailing descendants or borders.)
The character combines imagery of a person with streaming, trailing garments (like robes with long hems trailing at the edges), representing the flowing fringe of land or the long trailing line of descendants.
- 亠 lid or crown at the top
- 巳 snake/embryo shape in the middle
- 衣 clothing base at the bottom
Phonetic Family (形声字家族)
7· Phonetic Root: 衣 (yī)Origin: Originally depicted long, trailing robes or garment edges. Over time, the meaning extended from the hem or fringe of clothing to geographical borders and the trailing generations of a family tree (descendants).
Semantic Evolution: From 'edge of a garment' to 'border/fringe of a country', and finally to 'descendants trailing from a common ancestral root'.
- Often preserved in modern compound words like '华裔' (Hua-yi, Chinese descent) and '后裔' (descendants).
Picture a family wearing traditional flowing robes (衣) whose long trailing hems stretch all the way down to distant lands, representing generation after generation of descendants (裔).
yìTreating 裔 as an independent standalone word in everyday spoken conversation, whereas it is primarily a bound morpheme used in formal compounds.
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