Why was 売 simplified with a 儿?

[SusuKacangSoya]

Why was 売る simplified from 賣 with a 儿 instead of 貝/買?

買 and 賣 have the same bottom radical, but in simplification 買 was left alone and 賣 had its 貝 changed to 儿, a completely unrelated radical.

Am I correct in guessing that removing 土 was an invalid move, so they were forced to switch out the 貝 radical in 賣?

现代汉语通用字表 discarded the two characters entirely and went with 买 and 卖.

 

[nice gaijin]

It seems like you are talking about the simplification of Chinese, but on the wrong board? We have a Chinese section.

 

[SusuKacangSoya]

It seems like you are talking about the simplification of Chinese, but on the wrong board? We have a Chinese section.

*offers tea*

No, I'm not talking about the simplification of Chinese. The last sentence was a comparison to how the Chinese dealt with the matter of simplifying the two.

I'll copy the title to the post to emphasise... u.u

 

[Mike Cash]

買 and 賣 have the same bottom radical, but in simplification 買 was left alone and 賣 had its 貝 changed to 儿, a completely unrelated radical.

Am I correct in guessing that removing 土 was an invalid move, so they were forced to switch out the 貝 radical in 賣?

现代汉语通用字表 discarded the two characters entirely and went with 买 and 卖.

Since the 土 was the only distinction between the two it would hardly do to throw it out.

Notice that the yokome also got changed.

 

[nice gaijin]

Ah I was confused by the phrasing, and the fact that most of the characters in your question were Chinese, including the dictionary you referenced. We also have a learning Japanese forum.

I'm afraid I don't know why they chose to change the radical for shinjitai, maybe to further distinguish it from 買 visually.

 

[lincstreff]

Many official simplified forms of characters were based on shorthand ways of writing the characters that were already in common use. Some of these shorthand forms were based on or influenced by the “cursive script” forms of the characters (i.e., 草書体). Looking at the cursive script forms of 賣 in several computer typefaces (you can try for yourself on this site: JTC淡斎草書「濃」｜ ダウンロードフォント｜アマナイメージズ I suspect that a cursive script-based shorthand was the origin of the modern simplified form of this character in Japan. Same for the simplified Chinese version, as well. As for the radical 儿, there is a common misconception that the radical of a character has a close relationship with the character meaning. While this is certainly true for many characters, it is also not true for quite a few characters. Specifically, for characters which do not contain a component which closely relates to the character meaning, the choice of radical is usually arbitrary. When 賣 was formally simplified to 売 in Japan, it was necessary to assign it to a different radical, as it no longer contained the 貝 component, which was the obvious choice of radical for the pre-simplification form. The choice of radical for the simplified form was pretty much limited to 士, 冖, or 儿. The choice of 儿 was almost certainly arbitrary.

 

[lincstreff]

Followup:
I don't care at all about character radicals, so didn't bother to check the radical of 売 before posting, and just took the OP's word for it. I decided to check it just now, and see that most sources consider 士 to be the character radical.
The OP was most likely misusing the term "radical" to mean any component / element of a chatacter. This has become very common these days, as there are numerous kanji learning websites, including some popular ones, that misuse this term.