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Why can a Japanese kanji character have more than one pronunciation?
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Japanese language
Record of a haiku exchange on kaishi writing paper by Japanese poet Bashō and one of his pupils in the teacher's own handwriting, 17th century, from a hanging scroll (ink on paper).
The complexity of kanji pronunciation in the Japanese language stems from the historical adaptation of Chinese characters to a language that originally lacked a writing system. Because these characters were imported to represent both Chinese meanings and sounds, they developed two distinct types of readings:1234
- On-yomi (on): This reading is based on the Japanese interpretation of the original Chinese pronunciation of the character. It is most commonly used when characters are combined to form compound nouns.34
- Kun-yomi (kun): This reading assigns a native Japanese word or word element to the character that corresponds to its original Chinese meaning. A single kanji often possesses multiple kun readings.34
This dual-value system arose because the Japanese had to use great ingenuity to adapt characters designed for Chinese monosyllables to their own agglutinative language. Consequently, while kanji provide the core meaning for nouns and verb roots, the surrounding grammatical markers are typically indicated by kana syllabaries like hiragana.12