Ashi

⾜, 足, Ashi, あし, leg.

Ashi (Radical 157) is set of the following Unicode characters:

X2F9C ⾜, KanjiRadical

X8DB3 足, KanjiLiberal

These characters have similar graphical representations, similar pronunciations (for example, "ashi", あし) and similar meanings; they may refer to a leg(s) or to feet (foot) as part(s) of body.

Confusion

Support of Japanese characters in computers is underdeveloped.
Up to year 2021, there is no united standard for the default font, that would allow each character to look the same at different computers, but different from other characters.

At some computers (Macintosh), images of characters X2F9C ⾜ and X2F9C 足 look so similar, that even a native Japanese speaker, watching 足 and 足, is unlikely to answer:
Which of them is X2F9C?
Which of them is X8DB3?

In such a case, the correct specification of the character would be "X2F9C ⾜ or X2F9C 足"

Such a complicated construction is difficult to pronounce. It can be replaced with single word Ashi or Radical 157.

Radical 157

In wikipedia, characters X2F9C ⾜ and X8DB3 足 are qualified as Radical_157 .

However, word Radical_157 is difficult to pronounce, if some of characters ⾜, 足 appear in the text. Term Ashi seems to be more suitable.

AshiHan

There is important question, whether character AshiHan X2ECA ⻊ should be included in to sets Radical 157 and Ashi, or not.

Visually, all the three characters look similar: at Linux and at Macintosh and ⻊,⾜,足 at your computer.

Even at Macintosh, character AshiHan X2ECA ⻊ is still distinguishable from ⾜ and 足.

For this reason, in the first versions of definitions to terms Ashi and Radical 157, the AshiHan is not included.

Feet or leg?

Sound Ashi (あし) may correspond also to character 脚; Jisho suggests:

脚 Variants: 踋 skids, leg, undercarriage, lower part, base Kun: あし On: キャク、 キャ、 カク

In principle, semantic of Ashi should be narrowed to foot, excluding legs, by using 脚 in sense of leg(s). On the other hand, graphic of character 脚 is complicated; if such a character appears in a printed text or in a displayed text designed for the Human reading, then, the whole paragraph (or the whole article) should appear with font, significantly larger (at least twice larger than that sufficient for Ascii characers); so, the information capacity of the text decreases instead of increasing; and character 脚 is not popular in Japanese.

Character 脚 is not included into BasicJapanese. Instead, ascii word Ashi or hiragana あし may be used, it it does not alter the meaning of the sentence.

References

Keywords

Ashi, Japanese, KanjiLiberal, KanjiRadical, Radical 157, Unicode, X2ECA ⻊ , X2F9C 足 , X2F9C 足 , あしはん, あしはん