I’m learning the Versus kanji (again) and I notice that it supposedly contains the writing radical, but it doesn’t look anything like the writing radical. Instead it looks exactly like the map radical with a lid radical over it.
Here is Versus and its supposed radical composition:
And you can see, the kanji does not look like it contains the writing radical. The stool lines are disconnected from the lid and angled making them look exactly like the treasure radical:
So then the question is why do we consider this to be the writing radical instead of the treasure radical? And is this a common pattern in Japanese where one radical in certain usages evolves to look exactly like a different radical?
The official radical of that one is actually 寸 not the 文 part 対 | 漢字一字 | 漢字ペディア (see 部首).
Everything else that is not an official radical is pretty arbitrarily decided by WaniKani staff. Sometimes the mnemonic works better that way and sometimes just reducing the number of radicals to remember might be a reason to choose one over the other.
So the radicals on WaniKani are more a help for remembering the mnemonic than an actual radical.
If it works better for you with lid and treasure, and you can come up with a good mnemonic I would say go for it. I think the distinction is only relevant in writing though. No other Kanji looks even remotely like 対 that I know of and that you could confuse with it.
For what it’s worth, both Writing and Lid + Treasure would imply the same, correct stroke order for writing 対 by hand. This suggests to me that if you were to write it by hand with a small 文 instead that a reader would pass it off as a quirk of your handwriting?
It is also fairly common for a kanji component on the left side to be a bit shifted or stylised compared to when it’s a full kanji of its own. Compare:
足 趺
人 仕
土 城
心 情
力 加
木 林
示 神
which have varying degrees of adjustment as they squash into the left side position and get simplified. The “last part tilts up and right” happens because when you’re writing a left side component the next thing you do is move up to start on the right side.
But as others say, there is no standard traditional breakdown of every part of every kanji, so the “western style” mnemonic systems have to make their own choices and assign their own labels in many cases. WK’s design does not care about flagging up distinctions that only matter when you’re writing, so it can merge some things that look mostly similar but aren’t identical.
I am often surprised by the amount of attention given to small font differences here in WK.
対 is actually a variant form (used in modern Japanese ) of 對 (in modern Chinese the simplified form is 对).
So, while etymologically, the left part of 対 has not the same origin as 文, it evolved to be written the same. 対 is canonically decomposed as ⿱文寸 (and 文 itself is canonically decomposed as ⿱亠乂 ). Note that in most handwriting they will look exactly the same. For a 文 in the left (that is, stretched) it makes sense to leave some white space, otherwise there would be too much ink together at the top and it will be less legible. Note also that in Chinese typefaces it is very common to use the shape in the left side of 対 you pointed out, for the full size 文.
While 工 and エ (or 口 and ロ) are complete different things (even if they look absolutely the same in almost any font you will see), the left part of 対 and 文 are the same (even if most fonts show some slight difference). Isn’t it fun?
Even for a single kanji, different fonts may show quite important visual differences, even simple and very common ones like 令, 言 or 戸 can have the orientation and even nature of some of the strokes that change with the different font styles. (But that exists in Latin fonts too… “g” or “a” for example)
