The title is kind of misleading, but I’ve been studying Japanese for a while now and I just thought of something.
To be more exact for example, 今 can be read as いま, for Kun or こん, for On, and 日 can be read as ひ, etc, for Kun and にち, etc, for On. But how exactly does putting them together make きょう. Like was it just decided that putting those two characters together would sound like that? Like where exactly does the う come from. Am I overthinking it?
ありがとう
6 comments
Because the language and words were made before the kanji… kanji was applied to (most) words retrospectively (I.e. once the word was already a word)
Thats an example of an “irregular reading”. Some kanjis/words have irregular readings were kanji pronunctuations don’t matter.
-in a nutshell
In addition to what /u/toiukotodesu said, for 今日→きょう specifically it’s because 今 can also be け in rare cases (as in 今朝), and 日 used to also have a form read as ふ in earlier Japanese, so 今日 was けふ, which then shifted to きょう over the centuries
More generally it’s really common for words to be spelled with a multi-kanji compound (usually taken straight from Chinese) purely based on meaning even if those characters have absolutely no phonetic or etymological relation to the word. This is called 熟字訓（じゅくじくん）and some common examples are: 明日（あした・あす）、昨日（きのう）、一日（ついたち）、大人（おとな）、大和（やまと）、風邪（かぜ）、下手（へた）、田舎（いなか）、吹雪（ふぶき）、煙草（タバコ）、土産（みやげ）、眼鏡（めがね）、浴衣（ゆかた）、梅雨（つゆ）
There’s also an inordinate amount of 熟字訓 for animal and plant names and such, ranging from those everyone knows to the super obscure: 海豚、海星、蚯蚓、蜥蜴、蜘蛛、蜻蛉、馴鹿、蟷螂、土竜、栗鼠、壁蝨、蛞蝓、家鴨、山羊、蒲公英、薔薇、百合、無花果、檸檬、向日葵、山葵、大蒜, just to name a few
They chose the appropriate characters to represent spoken words. The pronunciations didn’t line up though, but when you see those together you know that’s what it means. Typically kanji follows the rules and when it doesn’t like 今日 or 今朝 you know what it is
they don’t, you have it backwards, you never “read kanji”
kanji are just how a word is spelled, and the letters and the pronunciation can change over long periods of time, just like english spellings and pronunciations can as well
just like in the english sentence:
the `lead` fisherman put a `lead` weight on their line
the only way you know how to pronounce both `lead`s is because you can identify the word given the letters and also the context in the sentence, and therefore you know the pronunciation because you memorized it
japanese is the same. when you memorize words, memorize their spelling and pronunciation. then and only then can you read
it’s true that patterns of pronunciation exist, just like patterns exist in english as well, and knowing what kinds of patterns there are can help with remembering words and pronunciations, but there’s no way to know for sure what the meaning or pronunciation of a word in kanji is if you don’t know the word. you might be able to make a strong guess, but it won’t be for sure. there’s only so much value in trying to memorize every possible pronunciation of “e” and then expecting it to work for all new words you see
so just memorize words and the patterns will form and merge over time
Because Kanji came from China which mean when it was imported people also imported how they sound
For example let’s say 大
back when it was imported Chinese people pronounced it だい/たい but even before this Chinese character existed Japanese people called it something large 大きい
That’s why when people say something is large we use 大きい but when we make a word using two characters we use だい・たい