Glenn said:
Well, have you ever seen a sentence like 安だけを望んでいます? I haven't, but then again, my experience with the language is far from exhaustive. My point is that many kanji are more similar to affixes in English than they are words. For example, un is not a word. It does, however, have meaning. It is a negating prefix. Are you telling me that 安 is used like I used it above, as an entire word meaning "peace?"
That aside, it seems that it doesn't mean "cheap" when used alone, if it indeed is. But according to my search of the 大辞林, it isn't.
安だけを望んでいます？。。。Only looking forward to peace?
Well, I don't know if the word 安 can be used in such a way? But I haven't seen anyone using it like this.
I think you might have misunderstood what I am try to say. First, you need to know the concept of letter, character and word.
In japanese and chinese, each kanji is a character, it is unlike the roman alphabet. And almost all of these individual character have its own meaning since it was created in china long time ago. Most of the original meaning is still preserved in both language today. However, some of its original meaning might not be used commonly today.
Since each kanji has its own meaning, it can exist as an individual or as an
"affixes" as you mention. But I don't called it an affixes, as it is just a combination of characters, I will elaborate below.
For example, when the character 安 stand alone, it actually means peace or safe. Actually it means cheap only when it is written 安い. Because when the price is cheap, it is safe and you will feel "peaceful". That is how the meaning "cheap" come about. In fact, 安い means peace also. Example: 気安い、心安い。
When it combines with another kanji, such as 安全、it means safe, totally safe. The character 安 gives the meaning of safe, and the character 全 gives the meaning of total. So it is "totally safe". But, in today terms, the whole word 安全 means to give people the meaning of safe, and the character that gives 安全 the meaning of safe is 安. Hope you can understand what I am trying to say.
Another example, 気安い, meaning relaxed. 気 gives the meaning of "energy" or "ki" (if you practise aikido, you will know the meaning of this word) or "qi" (in the chinese term). And 安 as mentioned earlier gives the meaning of peace. So when the whole word 気安い means "peaceful energy", which means relaxed.
Going back to your sentence, 安だけを望んでいます？ I am not sure whether it can be used this way to make a sentence. I need to point out that, people generally don't used a stand-alone kanji meaning to make a sentence just like you do, in both japanese and chinese, as the meaning will be vague. Stand-alone kanji only gives a generally meaning in both of these langauges. To gives precise meaning of a word, it usually have to be combined with another kanji. Such as the above example 安全、気安い、心安い、公安。。。etc. The character 安 only gives general meaning of safe, but it does't specifically tells you what kind of safe or peace or cheap it means.
But if you were to write an ancient chinese or japanese article. Then you may use the stand-alone kanji to make a sentence. Which makes it one of the reason, why those ancient articles are so difficult to read and understand, even for both chinese and japanese speaker. Language is a flexible thing, it can be creative, that is where the beauty is. You may use it in the way you used it, such as that sentence, if the general speakers of that language can understand. Why not? The purpose of language is to convey your thought to another human being.