I create this post because I have often questions about origin of characters...
Here is one : why do we have the water key in 注 ? I guess the right part is phonetical, but why 水 ？
#etymology questions
tulip bobcat
tulip bobcat
I guess yuan is also phonetical in 愿 ?
safe sky
Probably because people wanted to coin a character for a word meaning "fill, pour..." specific to water and just used 主 as phonetic symbol. There were words of phonetic series *TO whose essential meaning was "fill". A few possible cognates are recorded with different phonetic symbols, e.g. 铸/toh/, 斗/tˤoʔ/, 投/dˤo/ etc, and also the word recorded by 註/toh/ later, meaning "annotate, record...".
sand idol
Let me paint a picture for u. U r pouring water into a bottle or a bucket （no matter what container, and the action is what 注 means ),what sound would you hear?like’zhu zhu Zhu’ right? so it’s why 主, 主 offer the pronunciation to 注，主 is coined earlier than 注,so ancient people can choose 主 as phonetic symbol. and the water key to remind ppl the object what 注 describes about.
Chinese characters originated from pictographs,so you almost potentially get some hints for the meanings when u see the characters.if u can’t,then search for traditional characters, it’ll make sense.