Bit of an unusal post here, hear me out.
I’ve spent this year cramming kanji meanings at an extreme pace. I’m just focusing on meanings for now, so that I can intuit my way around new compounds and signage without actually ‘saying’ it in my head—and learning readings as I use them. This is especially important to me as the number of readings some kanji have or the obscure cases you’ll run into them seems far more high-level than I’m at right now, and I’d rather enjoy the fun of being able to understand even if my verbal fluency lags severely behind.
That brings me to a very unusual question I’ve stumbled into by chance. By sticking together radicals, some kanji form meanings that are very literal. 口 + 犬 makes 吠, or ‘to bark’, or ほえ. This can conjugate to 吠える to become the act of barking, or poetically things that ‘bark’ their sound (maybe like a chainsaw?). 口 + 鳥 forms 鳴 ‘cry’ or ‘ring’, and conjugates to 鳴く which represents more shrill sounding noises, and could be used for the beeps of a watch alarm etc. (more like tweeting!). Recently, I discovered 口 + 猫 form 喵 which means to meow…and from there I’ve started finding more questions.
So, first of all 喵 does not have a reading on Google Translate nor Jisho, but translating it from Chinese to Japanese results in ニャー. The Chinese reading is Miāo. Putting う sounds on it out of curiousity (like with 鳴く or 吠える) results in the translations such as “sigh” or “cry”. 喵 is notably missing from Jisho.
Therein lies my first question. How would a Japanese speaker refer to the kanji 喵, verbally? Is its reading にゃあ or is it みあお? Hypothetically if I were to “force” meowing into a -u verb in the same way you can with barking and tweeting, how would I do that—like which underlying rules dictate which -u form it takes (if it is even possible to conjugate in that way)?
But I found myself asking if there’s any other animal radicals you can put with 口 to get a “sound” kanji. That’s when I found 口 + 馬 = 嗎. Google translate just gives “Ugh” as a translation (I like to think it gave up trying) and offers no readings. 10ten and Jisho tell me it’s a “Final interrogative particle” and translating from Chinese-to-Japanese tells me it functions as the same as if the sentence were structured “それは…ですか?”
However, said Jisho page is a lot less comprehensible than usual. It gives the readings Kun: ののし.る and On: バ, but I can’t get 嗎 to result from either reading using my input method (on win/android, at least). Also where did Google get that “ugh” translation from?
Anyway the only real conclusion I’ve drawn so far is that I should probably learn some more dictionary services than the ones I’ve mentioned here嗎?
^(Hey also weird fun-fact I discovered in the process of this post, but google translates “ば” on its own to the typo “palce”.)
3 comments
Some kanji which exist in Chinese don’t exist in Japanese.
Japanese has a way to show the sound a cat makes with phonetic kana, but Chinese only ever has kanji, so they needed to adapt the character to reflect that sound.
Some translation software also does weird things! Don’t always trust it
Quite a lot that needs to be said here.
Kanji don’t “conjugate” to words. For example, ほえる is a verb that uses the kanji 吠. This character was decided to fit the meaning for ほえる when the Japanese adopted kanji from the Chinese.
You can’t “force” verbs that don’t exist. 吠える exists. 鳴く exists. Those are the original words that the kanji characters later were decided to be used in.
喵 is a Chinese character. It does not exist in Japanese. A very creative writer could probably use it if he/she really wanted to, and in that case there would furigana on the top of it. It might be hard to believe, but even Japanese people aren’t expected to know Chinese.
嗎 is also a Chinese character. It doesn’t exist in modern Japanese, however it did in the past. Nowadays we use 罵 instead. 罵る is read ののしる, and 罵 is read as ば in other words like 罵倒（ばとう）. One can assume that 嗎 had the same readings in the past, which is why the dictionaries you tested gave this result.
If you try to create new kanji from random radicals, you are very likely to end up with a Chinese character not used in Japanese, so don’t expect Japanese dictionaries to cover them. Because, you know, it is not Japanese.
other commenters covered the topic better so i won’t repeat, but one important lesson learned is to look up sentence examples for new words. not only is it not always obvious how words are used, but it’s not always obvious what’s an extremely rare or archaic word. if you look up things in weblio or the like, and there’s zero or very few example sentences, or the example sentences all sound like they’re in technical manuals, it’s a good sign that it’s probably not something you should be using. and if a particular kanji used in a particular word is not used, it might be a very archaic, or just arbitrarily poetic, use, and thus also something not to be copied.
* [https://ejje.weblio.jp/](https://ejje.weblio.jp/)
* [https://massif.la/ja](https://massif.la/ja)
* [https://kotobank.jp/](https://kotobank.jp/)