[thaumasiotes]

> I had a snippet about how 他 was made up of 也 and 人, "also a person", but ended up editing it out, as I wasn't sure it was actually connected w/ Japanese using it to mean "other".

Well, I don't think it's true, either. As I understand it, the form 他 is just a graphical simplification of 佗, with no connection to the character 也. (You can think of this as similar to how the left-hand component in 脸 is 肉, not 月.) It isn't clear to me either that the character 也 would have held any sense of "also" when the form 他 appeared, though this is a question I'm agnostic on.

I've watched several videos on youtube in which someone presents Japanese people with uncommon kanji and asks them to read them, or failing that to speculate on what they might say. The Japanese unfailingly speculate that both halves of a compound character are relevant to the meaning, which surprises me - it's very rare for a character to be constructed from two meaningful parts. Far more common are the characters in which one part gestures at the meaning and the other part tells you the pronunciation, and 佗 is one of those. 从人它聲。