When going through the context sentences for “一つ” I came across the following sentence:
お一人さま一つかぎりです。
When I attempted to read this I read it as “おひとりさま” but in the provided audio example it sounds more like ‘おかすとさま’. I couldn’t find anything about this so I figured I’d use the forum for the first time to ask. Any help understanding is appreciated, thank you!
Hi and welcome.
I would read it the same as you and that’s the only thing that makes sense in my mind.
Only thing I can think of it’s that it is a persons name: 一人 #names - Jisho.org
かずと maybe? without the recording it is hard to say ^^
Seems strange though since most of them are marked as given name and adressing one by a given name but with さま seems …
Do you have more info where you get the audio for the sentence or even where the sentence is from?
The sentence is on this page WaniKani / Vocabulary / 一つ
But there’s no audio sample to go with it, that might be a userscript.
It should be pronounced おひとりさま.
Ah okay. Yes with the translation I agree 100%. No doubt it’s read ひとり.
Could it be a loan word inserted instead of the “actual” reading? かすと seems like it could be カストマー, which would fit into the sentence meaning-wise as well. 一人 as “one person” doesn’t make much sense with 一つかぎりです - “one person is limited to one”.
Specifying お一人様 as being individual customers makes a bit of sense - “one customer at a time”, so maybe it’s done as a sort of disambiguation? Just guessing here.
Note that I’m not sure this is a thing that really happens. I think I’ve seen it sometimes, but I can’t for the life of me think of an example.
I think whatever transliteration engine the userscript that does Text-to-Speech uses has some rules to figure out when a word is a name, and one of those rules is probably if it had honorifics like さん or さま attached to it.
In names 一 is often read かず when in the first position and 人 is often read と in the final position, so the userscript thinking it’s pronounced かずと makes sense.
The correct reading is definitely おひとりさま.
Is this some sort of kun’yomi fossil from prehistoric times or am I just unaware of some obvious circumstance in which Japanese people read one as かず?
Can’t find any words in which one is かず
人 being と is kinda ok. Just got rid of the ひ I guess
It’s a nanori reading. Many kanji have lots of readings beyond on and kun, specifically for use in names.
So yeah, I wouldn’t call it a “kunyomi fossil.” I would just call it nanori.
But like, what’s the reason for it? How did the association come to be? Is there not some ancient reason for these nanori readings?
There’s always some reason, right? I’m not sure why it matters much for this, since at this point I doubt any speaker thinks about it at all.
Could literally be related to 数 or 数える, but you’d probably need a name etymology dictionary or something.
It could also be a modification of something similar like かす or かつ.
Names are especially liberally constructed. Unless you’re particularly interested in names, it’s not worth spending much effort to track down every etymology. 一 has like 20 other readings used in names too. It can be as simple as “someone liked the sound of the name and the look or meaning of 一 and bam, they made a new name, and other people thought it was good too”
The wikipedia page for 人名訓, which has a list of some name-readings sorted by pronunciation, includes:
which agrees with you.
On the liberal construction of name readings, this academic article/paper on the wide variety of readings that can be used for a name written with particular kanji includes an example (結愛 to be read as ゆら) where they say of the ら reading for 愛: “This probably comes from the English word love, which is pronounced as rabu (らぶ) in Japanese and is abbreviated to ra” …
I just wanted to say thanks to everyone contributing to the conversation. I didn’t even realize it was a script because I pretty much exclusively access Wanikani through the Jakeipuu app (great app so far if anyone is interested). Here’s a Youtube link to audio clip but it does seem to come from a name as per previous answers: August 28, 2022 - YouTube
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