贊

• Functional Support: To help, assist, or aid. Often implies providing the backing necessary to make an action or position viable.
• Administrative/Courtly: As a noun, an assistant, attendant, or subordinate official. As a verb, to serve as an auxiliary to a superior or aid in the execution of official tasks.
• Evaluative Support: To praise, laud, commend, or formally endorse.
• Literary Genre: The //zan//; a short, laudatory summary, commemorative poem, or critical coda often appended to a larger work.

• Verb: Typically transitive (e.g., 贊之), taking the person assisted or the subject praised as its object.
• Noun: Refers to a person (an assistant/official) or a text (a laudatory poem).
• Modifier: Used to describe something auxiliary or supportive in nature.

• Vs. 助 (zhù): 贊 often implies "backing" or providing support rather than performing the primary labor.
• Vs. 佐 (zuǒ) and 輔 (fǔ): Similar administrative roles, though generally less specialized than the specific "auxiliary" nuance of 輔.

• Orthography: In older texts, frequently interchangeable with 讚 (the form with the speech radical 言). The absence of the speech radical does not preclude a meaning of "praise."
• Variants: Simplified variant U+8D5E.

• Determine if the context implies a "hand" (administrative assistance) or a "voice" (praise/endorsement).

// If the glyph appears as a heading or in a table of contents, it likely refers to the formal literary genre (//zan*).

• In early texts, do not rely on the presence or absence of the speech radical to distinguish between "help" and "praise."