So, I just guru-ed 供, and I am now learning the related vocab.
供 is servant on wanikani yet, the vocabulary we learn with the kanji are ‘child’, ‘offer’, ‘to make an offering’ and ‘supply’. On Jisho, the servant meaning is also not mentioned, nor does the search for ‘servant’ on Jisho yield a word with this kanji. So wouldn’t it then be more correct to change it to offer or something?
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I’m pretty sure it comes from just 供 (とも) which is not taught on WK. “Servant” is not listed as one of the words on the Jisho entry, but it’s not an unreasonable word to choose for the role of such a person (貴人や目上の者につき従って行くこと。また、その人。[monolingual entry] Someone who accompanies an important person to do things for them).
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The English meanings of individual kanji are just guidelines. If you think about it, 供’s English meaning could be anything. For example, even if the meaning was “lemon” it wouldn’t change the meaning of an actual word like 子供. Don’t think so hard about English meanings.
If you can just assign any meaning for any kanji, wouldn’t it make sense to choose something that helps you understand the words that the kanji is used in?
Yeah, I agree there’s not necessarily one single “correct” English meaning for each kanji, but it does make learning new words a lot easier when you can see the connection between the meaning of the word and the kanji it’s written with.
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According to this discussion, the ども might be the 共 pluralising suffix. They mention that through semantic shift, 子ども became to just mean child, pretty much like 友達 means just friend.
There is some uncertainty on how 共 and 供’s ども are etymologically related, but I would bet the 供 spelling is mainly due to folk etymology after the semantic shift has occurred, and not for the companion meaning.
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Sorry not sure what you’re getting at. This was just a discussion of why WK uses “servant” as a meaning for 供 in its kanji entry, and since 供 on its own can be a word that could be translated as “servant” in English, I offered that as why WK lists that meaning here.
I didn’t get into what it means in 子供…?
Well, when you start dealing with the thousands of words beyond Wanikani then you quickly drop English meanings since it’s more efficient to just learn the Japanese reading and what it means in Japanese as many times the meaning of the kanji can be too abstract for it to be useful. If you are just using it for mnemonics for Wanikani then that’s fine, I suppose. I think the fact we are having a discussion about this very simple thing right now kind of proves my point.
My reply wasn’t meant to be directed at you actually, that was a mistake 
I was just adding a comment to the general observation here that sometimes the meaning of a kanji doesn’t seem to make sense in the word it’s used in. The word/spelling 子供 definitely left me puzzled when I first learned it, since none of the meanings you can reasonably assign to 供 makes much sense for child.
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This topic reminded me of something I read something here or on the internet about 子供 being quite controversial because of the implication that the child is a servant to its elders.
Some quick googleing brought up this website , which says quite the same, and that this controversy is why it is often written using partial or all kana, 子ども/こども.
It seems that while today, seeing ‘servant’ in the word for child seemingly makes no sense, this is because languages and cultures change over time. The Japanese themselves also see 供 as meaning something like servant, so the meaning itself is not wrong, just seemingly disconnected from the words it is used in.
If you take into account when the language was created servant for child makes perfect sense. Western cultures also had that connotation for many countless years that a child existed to serve their parents until they grew of age to strike out on their own. And considering the amount of work there would have been in maintaining a household in the older times, there was surely some necessity to that.
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