Townsend Hiroko
PHONETIC COMPONENTS IN JAPANESE CHARACTERS
Presented to the
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Hiroko Townsend
This thesis is dedicated to my loving husband Dave, who has encouraged me all the time.
ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS
Phonetic Components in Japanese Characters by
Hiroko Townsend Master of Arts in Linguistics
San Diego State University, 2011
Japanese characters (hereafter referred to as kanji) give clues as to how their phonetic compounds are pronounced. Up until now, teachers and students of kanji have been expected to somehow connect the seemingly arbitrary assembly of strokes of kanji to the sounds of words that they refer to by rote memorization. However, this thesis will demonstrate that the reader can rely in a practical way on phonetic components to practically search for the pronunciation. A phonetic component is part of any compound character. In a compound kanji character, one component gives a clue about the meaning of the whole compound character and the other component gives a clue about the phonetic form. Studying phonetic components in kanji has the potential to revolutionize the teaching and learning of kanji, because the phonetic component is an implicit mnemonic for its pronunciation. What this thesis attempts to argue is that semantic components alone offer a somewhat limited, and unbalanced learning process for students. Particularly, when a kanji character has many complicated strokes, it may be burdensome to memorize its sound as its radical does not provide a hint for its pronunciation. Through the utilization of both phonetic components and semantic components together, teachers can offer students multiple ways to break up kanji into meaningful units. Students can relate a particular graphic element to either its sound or its meaning, making it more likely that the student will remember it and use it correctly in the future. Further, by using phonetic components, teachers of kanji can help their students save much effort that is required for rote memorization of pronunciation.
The thesis includes a list of 146 phonetic components, which was garnered from 2,230 kanji characters in the Japanese dictionary. The list is classified into five categories, ranging from phonetic components that are completely regular to those that are completely irregular.
ABSTRACT ...............................................................................................................................v
LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................................. viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................... ix
1 INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................12 PHONETIC COMPONENTS ........................................................................................4
Pronunciation of Kanji .............................................................................................4Native Speakers .......................................................................................................5Chinese Readings and Japanese Readings ........................................................6Irregular Sounds .....................................................................................................12Semantic Components ...........................................................................................14Radicals ..................................................................................................................18Lexicography .........................................................................................................20
3 KANJI DICTIONARY ................................................................................................23Kanji Dictionary for Non-native Speakers ............................................................23Kanji Dictionary for Native Speakers ....................................................................24
4 RESEARCH METHOD ...............................................................................................265 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS ................................................................................276 PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS ............................................................................31
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................35
PHONETIC COMPONENTS AND COMPOUNDS ..................................................37
Table 1. Chinese and Japanese Readings of the Phonetic Components and their Compounds ....................................................................................................................8
Table 2. Sounds of Phonetic Components and Compounds in Chinese and Japanese ............13Table 3. Number and Proportion of Phonetic Components and their Compounds in
Each Category ..............................................................................................................28Table 4. Comparison of Chinese and Japanese Phonetic Components ...................................29
I would like to express my deep and sincere gratitude to Dr. Zev bar-Lev, the chair of
my thesis committee. He suggested the idea in the first place and his guidance and
encouragement aided the writing of this thesis in innumerable ways.
I also would like to thank the other two members of my committee, Dr. Ryu Kitajima
and Dr. James Schorr, for their time and advice in helping me complete this thesis.
I am also thankful to my dear friend, Dr. Lisa Nunn, for sparing her time to proofread
my thesis during the preparation.
So, what is a phonetic component? It is part of any compound character. A
compound character usually consists of two components put together, similar to compound
nouns in English, such as fireman [fire + man]. But in a compound kanji character, one
component gives a clue about the meaning of the whole compound character and the other
component gives a clue about the phonetic form.
The semantic components do provide clues to meanings. It might be thought that the
semantic component would be more important for comprehension; this would seem to be all
the more true because the kanji were borrowed from Chinese, undergoing significant and
even chaotic changes in the process of borrowing. Even given that Chinese phonetic
components are significant in Chinese (as shown in Phonetic Components in Chinese by
Wang, 2008), it would seem unlikely that the significance would survive the translation
into Japanese. But it does seem clear that the phonetic element plays a more important role
than the semantic element for native readers, because they can gain meanings from the
sounds and determine the meaning of kanji (DeFrancis, 1984 in Matsunaga, 1995).
Apparently some semantic components are too vague to be of real use in
comprehension; for example, the semantic component meaning mouth occurs in kanji
like member, goods, to know, (for magazines) issue No., to erupt
and phrase. Namely, Japanese native speakers would know the meaning of kanji more
from its pronunciation than from its semantic component. Clearly, the study of phonetic
components gives advantageous clue to learners particularly in aural comprehension.
Kanji are very different from English compound nouns, in which both the words are
pronounced equally. For example, kanji /han/ rice can be divided into the left and right
components: /shoku/ to eat and /han/ to rebel. The right side of kanji /han/ to
rebel gets attached to various characters and contributes its phonetic shape to compound
characters. These compound characters have the same pronunciation as /han/, for
example: /han/ rice, /han/ print, /han/ slope, /han/ sale and /han/. This
is a clear example of how kanji compounds with the same or similar pronunciations usually
include the same component. It is called a phonetic component because it provides a clue to
the pronunciation.
Studying phonetic components in kanji has the potential to revolutionize the teaching
and learning of kanji, because the phonetic component becomes what linguist Michael Pye
(1971) calls an obvious built-in mnemonic for its pronunciation. What this thesis attempts
to argue is that semantic components alone offer a somewhat limited, and unbalanced
learning process for students. Particularly, when a kanji character has many complicated
strokes, it can be burdensome to memorize its sound as its radical does not provide a hint for
its pronunciation. Through the utilization of both phonetic components and semantic
components together, teachers can offer students multiple ways to break up kanji into
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