How come the reading of 型録 is the same as the katakana spelling of the loanword catalogue? Is this rare?

How come the reading of 型録 is the same as the katakana spelling of the loanword catalogue? Is this rare?

by Mizukami2738

10 comments
  1. That is ateji. It means that the kanji have been assigned to the word based on the reading. They don’t have a etymological connection to the word.

    Ateji is not common per se, but not that uncommon either. This word however is extremely uncommon written with kanji like that.

  2. 頁 is also just ページ, for words where the original reading has fallen out of practice it’s not uncommon

  3. Some Western loanwords were given kanji, mostly ones borrowed between the Meiji era-WWII. You generally won’t see their kanji spellings often today, though it depends a bit on the word. I believe this is the first time I’ve seen カタログ rendered in kanji, though 頁 for “page” is common as another comment mentioned.

    They’re a mix of sound-based (瓦斯 for gas), meaning-based (燐寸 for match), and a couple like your example that got lucky and have both sound and meaning that make sense.

  4. It’s 当て字 (ateji). There are 2 types of ateji: one ignores the meanings of kanj and only uses them as phonetic characters, for example 亜米利加 is read as “amerika” and means “America” – if you try to look at meanings of these kanji you will only see gibberish. The second type of ateji only uses meanings of the characters and ignores their readings, for example 南瓜 “kabocha” means “pumpkin” or 緑啄木鳥 “aogera” a species of woodpecker. カタログ seems to be a mixed case: mainly phonetic with a hint of meaning.

  5. My native language is Russian, and the word 道路 (dōro, road) came as a surprise to me because in Russian “road” would be “doroga”. So a phrase like “dōro ga semai desu” translates into Russian as “doroga uzkaya”

  6. You’ll see this with countries* a lot as well, where kanji was given to the reading later on.

    亜米利加 (アメリカ) and 加奈陀 (カナダ) are good examples of this as well.

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