Wanikani lists the 莫 kanji meaning as “endless” but every entry i look at in my dictionaries say that it means “must not, do not, be not.” Literally nowhere have i seen it translated as “endless.” Why the discrepancy?
On a related note, why have the 莫 kanji and the 莫 radical called different things? Most kanji I’ve seen that consist of a single radical, aside from some super simple ones like 一, are the same. So why not just have the radical called endless instead of greenhouse?
Anyone have any input on either of these questions?
This character originally meant “sunset” and represented the sun sinking into bushes (the bottom bushes distorted into 大, see here on Wikitionary to see its evolution from bone script). It ended up being used phonetically to represent the grammar word for “there is none” since both words were almost pronounced the exact same. To make it clear when it does actually represents the original meaning of a sunset, a second sun was added to create the new kanji 暮 which you’ll see in level 33 (e.g. 暮れる = to get dark). As a result, the original kanji 莫 became the Chinese grammar thing and isn’t used a whole bunch in Japanese, acquiring a vague meaning of “there is none” or “must not”.
The “endless” meaning was really just made up by Wanikani to make 莫大 (huge) easy to remember. It actually literally means that “there is none bigger” (莫大 - Wiktionary)
Source on etymology of 莫 and 暮: The Complete Guide to Japanese Kanji by Christopher Seeley and Kenneth G. Henshall
Also cross-checked on “The Outlier Dictionary of Chinese Characters” by Outlier Linguistics
I actually emailed the WK team about this one near the end of last year and was told:
“Kanjipedia is generally our default resource, and you can see that the third definition is close to “endless” (はてしないさま): 莫 | 漢字一字 | 漢字ペディア”
But they acknowledged that the other definitions tended to be higher on the list and in January this year I was told they decided to add “not”, “do not” and “may not” to the allow list for the item 莫.
