1.3. KANJI 25a phonetic text to note that it should be pronounced as
, ”ekusakyuushion soodo”, atransliterationof the words ”exe-
cution sword” into Japanese. While this doesn’t make a real word, it
does allow a writer to paint with words - using the kanji as ”pictures” to
instil a sense of meaning, and adding an explicit pronunciation so that the
sentence can be pronounced as well as wriĴen.
Another, even wider used application of furigana, is the kind em-
ployed in sentences such as
, ”I dislike that person”. In this
sentence, the kanji is used with the phonetic guide text ”hito”, mean-
ing ”person”. However, this is not the real pronunciation of , which is
normally pronounced ”yatsu”, and doesn’t just mean ”person”, but is a
derogatory version of the word instead. In essence, while the reading re-
flects what the speaker is saying, the kanji form of the word expresses what
the speaker is actually thinking. This ”being able to express both what is
being thought and what is being said at the same time” is something that
is impossible without this particular feature of wriĴen Japanese.
1.3.3 Reading quirks: compound words
As mentioned in the section on kana pronunciations, there’s an odd quirk
involving the pronunciation of compounds words. This is best illustrated
with an example. If we combine the noun , ”ki”, meaning ’spirit’, or
’aĴention’, with the verb , ”tsuku”, to form the compound verb
, then its pronunciation is not ”kitsuku”. In fact, the second compound
voices, leading to its pronunciation being ”kidzuku” (or according to mod-
ern spelling, ”kizuku”). Why this voicing occurs is, sadly, completely and
entirely unknown. There are no rules that say when compound words are
”supposed” to voice, nor are there any rules we can abstract from all the
words that do – any rule that seems to explain half of all voicings that occur
in Japanese, don’t seem to apply to the other half.
The best advice there is, is simply: ”learn compound words as com-
plete words”. Even though they can be analysed as compounds, their
meaning is typically different from what the compounds individually mean,
so learning them as combinations of loose, smaller words, makes very liĴle
sense anyway.
1.3.4 Looking up kanji
If we wanted to look up kanji like , and檥, then one very obvious
feature we see is that all three seem to share a similar structure: to the