Do all kanji parts have a meaning?


I'm beginner in Japanese, and I was analysing some kanji. I was noticing the
parts of 燃. I see a dog there, a fire, another fire, and then there is this 夕
with two strokes in the middle instead of one, that apparently, as far as I
could look it up, doesn't actually have a meaning, or does it? If not, is
there many kanji with meaningless parts like this? How does it come to be?




Good question, with an unexpectedly complex answer.

'夕 with two strokes' is indeed a radical you can look up -- in particular it's
the 肉 (meat) radical. Radicals can have different appearances (variants), just
like the two appearances of the fire radical 火 in 燃.

燃 is a radical-phonetic compound made up of the fire radical 火 and the right
hand side 然. In turn, 然 is composed of the fire radical as well as the
components 肉 (meat) and 犬 (dog).

The reason why the fire radical appears here twice is this: the meaning of 然
in Old Chinese really was the same as 燃 (to burn)! Later in the development of
the Chinese writing system, the sound of 然 was borrowed for its present
meaning, and then the original character had the fire radical added to
represent its _original_ meaning.

A similar process, where for a certain character a new meaning comes to
replace the old meaning, and a radical is added to represent the old meaning,
happened to many other characters. One example is 雲, the original form of
which was 云 (which is now used in its borrowed meaning of 'to say').

The original meaning of 然 was "to roast dog meat over a fire", which was
broadened semantically to "to burn". Hopefully it's now clear why there's a 犬
in there.

EDIT:

To answer your general question though: "do all kanji parts have a meaning",
the answer is no. A character can't necessarily be broken down entirely into
semantic "atoms". See [the Wikipedia
article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Principles_of_formation)
on phono-semantic compounds for an example of non-semantic character
components.




Good question, with an unexpectedly complex answer.

'夕 with two strokes' is indeed a radical you can look up -- in particular it's
the 肉 (meat) radical. Radicals can have different appearances (variants), just
like the two appearances of the fire radical 火 in 燃.

燃 is a radical-phonetic compound made up of the fire radical 火 and the right
hand side 然. In turn, 然 is composed of the fire radical as well as the
components 肉 (meat) and 犬 (dog).

The reason why the fire radical appears here twice is this: the meaning of 然
in Old Chinese really was the same as 燃 (to burn)! Later in the development of
the Chinese writing system, the sound of 然 was borrowed for its present
meaning, and then the original character had the fire radical added to
represent its _original_ meaning.

A similar process, where for a certain character a new meaning comes to
replace the old meaning, and a radical is added to represent the old meaning,
happened to many other characters. One example is 雲, the original form of
which was 云 (which is now used in its borrowed meaning of 'to say').

The original meaning of 然 was "to roast dog meat over a fire", which was
broadened semantically to "to burn". Hopefully it's now clear why there's a 犬
in there.

EDIT:

To answer your general question though: "do all kanji parts have a meaning",
the answer is no. A character can't necessarily be broken down entirely into
semantic "atoms". See [the Wikipedia
article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Principles_of_formation)
on phono-semantic compounds for an example of non-semantic character
components.

