Onyomi reading of kanji

Japanese
#1

Hi fellow learners :slight_smile:

I’d like to get a better understanding of why there are often several readings for a single kanji, and especially why the onyomi reading even exists.

The japanese language borrowed the kanji from chinese rather than inventing its own symbols (ignoring hiragana and katakana).

Therefore it makes sense to me, that a single kanji is pronounced differently when used for different meanings. E.g. the kanji 相 is pronounced そう in 相談 where it has the meaning ‘mutual’, but しょう in 首相 where it has the meaning ‘minister’.

But there are a few things which I don’t understand.

  1. Why was it necessary, to also borrow the pronounciation from chinese (onyomi)?

  2. Was there no onyomi pronounciation in japanese before kanji symbols were adopted?

  3. Are there also multiple readings for one kanji in chinese?

  4. From a linguistic/historic point of view, how did jukugo arise?

Thanks in advance for your help :slight_smile:

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#2

Really good questions, following for the answers and discussion.

#3

Quick preface: i use the word ‘chinese’ as a catch-all for all chinese languages in this post. It would be a bit complicated if I were more specific. The dominant language in china changed with the dynasty in charge. It’s a complicated history. Even today there are upwards of 10 language families that can rightfully be called ‘chinese’

  1. It was not initially used to transcribe Japanese. Rather, Chinese was used for official documents. It was not until later that people started using Chinese characters to transcribe Japanese. This was around the 9th century, iirc, so around 400 years after the introduction of chinese writing.

  2. Nope. On-yomi is just the chinese reading of the character. There was no writing system prior to kanji.

  3. There are not multiple readings in chinese, unless you count how the different languages pronounce them. Kanji have both a phonetic and logographic component. This is only sometimes useful i. japanese because there are so many readings for the same phonetic components. In chinese, you can generally blind-read hanzi if you know the phonetic component. Every kanji can have up to, i believe, three different on-yomi readings, because there were three major periods where kanji and loan words were imported from china. The dominant language in china was different each time they did this.

  4. This has roots in Kanbun (a way of annotating chinese writing to be intelligible in Japanese) and Bungo (a highly literary court version of Japanese that heavily used chinese words and readings which remained unchanged for almost a thousand years.) They stopped writing official documents in Bungo after world war two.

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#4

The Chinese reading of a kanji is referred to as the “on” reading and the native Japanese reading as the “kun” reading. “Kun” reading would be their pronunciation before symbols were adopted.

Kanji were reintroduced to Japan several times throughout its history with 3 generally distinct periods/regions. So the “on” reading could be broken down into general groups that include:

  • Go-on (Wu dialect of southern China, 5-6th century)

  • Kan-on (Tang Dynasty, 7-9th century)

  • Tōsō-on (Hangchow dialect, 14-16th century)

image
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Source: Japanese by Soichi Iwasaki

1 Like
#5

Also, you were curious about 相. I actually remember looking this one in a big huge paper kanji reference up at one point, curious which one was the original meaning. That one strangely did not have that noted. Most of the other entries marked one if the senses as the original. Wikipedia had my back, though. The original meaning was ‘Look’. Eventually the meaning shifted in chinese to ‘compare’, and the different senses in which it’s used in japanese (minister, mutual, aspect) come from this shift.

#6

https://www.kanjidamage.com/kanji_facts

Quotes from Kanji Damage

  1. Japanese traders needed to communicate with their Korean and Chinese counterparts. For every existing Japanese word (what we today call the ‘KUNyomi’ word), they tried to find the corresponding Chinese kanji, and pair them up. Furthermore, they decided to use the Chinese pronunciation of the words, too, but got it wrong … It’s kind of like Canada: everyone in Canada has to learn Quebeqois French, even though real French can’t understand Quebeqois-French

  2. yes

  3. China has hella different dialects. So one Japanese trader would come back from Shanghai, where they pronounce 青い (blue) as SEI, and he’d teach everyone in his town to say SEI. Meanwhile, another Japanese trader would come back from Hong Kong, where they pronounce 青い as SHOU, and he’d teach everyone in HIS town to say SHOU. So there’s that.

  4. see 1

#7

Seems like they’re uhhhhhhhh playing a little fast and loose with how it went down.