The top part of 左 and 右 aren’t radicals. The radicals for those are 工 and 口
And yeah, I acknowledged that some others do have hand as a tangential meaning, but the one with the meaning “hand” is 手/⺘. It’s like a top 5 radical in terms of usage.
Just out of curiosity, where did you get the info for that list?
I stick with the name WK gives unless I know it as something else, it matches a kanji or it appears with a different meaning in a better mnemonic from other sources. I’ve also found that if I can’t remember a kanji meaning now I can rattle through the different “radical” meanings in the hope of working it out.
Let’s say that “radical” is used quite loosely here, if there is a “narwhal” under “Radicals” in WaniKani I think it’s relevant for this thread.
I found that the kanjialive site to be quite informative:
https://kanjialive.com/214-traditional-kanji-radicals/
You can search for kanji in the app, it shows the radical and a hint, which offer shorter and oftentimes more memorable explanations than WK (when you consider that the explanations are from people centuries ago in a quite militarized context). It is quite consistent to what I read before about kanji interpretations.
In another thread I just found this link, it looks also very interesting. It seems that many more things started off as hands.
But the point of this is to talk about what WK decided to do relative to the “real” radicals. You suggested that their decision on what to call ⺘ was influenced by the other hand radicals. So the “real” hand radicals are what is important if you’re going to base your decision on that.
On the kanjialive site (and most other sites that mention the “real” radicals), only ⼶ and 又 have other hand related meanings, and they’re not a pure “hand”.
Like I said, it’s not that ⺘ is the only hand, but it’s the one that means hand the vast majority of time that a hand meaning is intended.
Whoops, sorry, I only remembered the “all radicals meanings are so different” part of the question. I think it’s still more helpful for me to think of some kanji parts (or “WK radicals”) as hands, though.
WAIT HOLD UP
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