Hi,
I often use jisho.org to get a fuller picture of what is taught to me via WaniKani.
One thing that bothers me is that I used to believe the kanji view would list all readings.
But when I check 母 it does not list かあ as in お母さん.
Or the とう of 父 in お父さん.
Is Jisho incomplete, or is there some other reason?
かあ might be considered a special reading, I’m not sure. But even this Japanese kanji website doesn’t list it as a kun’yomi or on’yomi reading.
I would agree these are special readings.
The on’yomi you for instance have in 祖父「そふ」 and 祖母「そぼ」, but お祖父さん and お祖母さん are special as well. There is also 親父「おやじ」with an irregular reading for 父.
That’s unfortunately not the case, because a lot of words have irregular kanji readings. In Jisho these are shown as furigana pushed to the left and not directly over each kanji character, since the reading is tied to an entire word, not the kanji alone. For instance, おかしい。
It might also help if you think about it like this:
母 doesn’t have the reading かあ,
おかあさん can be written お母さん because it means mom.
In a sort of similar way, you might see in a book, say,
吸血鬼 - kanji that mean “vampire” (lit. blood sucking demon)
with the furigana providing the reading:
ヴァンパイア - the English word “vampire” spelled out in katakana.
吸, 血, and 鬼, definitely don’t have the readings ヴァン, パ, and イア respectively, but an author can still use them to clarify the meaning of the English word “vampire” for Japanese readers because they both mean the same thing.
So I guess what I mean is that being used for a word doesn’t mean you should necessarily 100% of the time think of a kanji as having that reading.
That would be the same logic as spelling fish “ghoti” in English. (i.e. the existence of the word “action” doesn’t inherently make “sh” a valid “reading” of “ti”)
I hope that makes sense! If it’s any consolation, this is the kind of thing you get used to and seems less weird over time…
Huh, I was under the impression that かあ and はは were etymologically equivalent, but underwent sound changes differently. Have I just made that up?
oh, I mean, probably! That’s how a lot of that kind of inconsistency shows up. I didn’t mean to speak etymologically.
Similarly I’d have to imagine the に in にほん was originally the same にち in lots of other words but when a different thread said 日 had に as a reading I was confused until I remembered that one word, since it’s an exception (at least as it’s spelled/pronounced today)
Almost as though the Japanese writing system/language seems to defy our attempts to assign readings to Kanji one-to-one…
Thanks folks, I got a little bit wiser, and a little bit more frustrated with Japanese. Yet I continue learning. Is it Stockholms Syndrome at this point I wonder…
It’s best to just learn a couple ‘catchall’ readings per kanji (like WK does in the kanji lessons), and learn other readings as they come up. Pretty much all Japanese origin words are backformations. The word existed, and then someone had to write it down and thought, ‘this kanji would go well with this word, the meaning is related’. And other times they were like: ‘I know this word means something slightly different depending on context: I’ll use this kanji here, and another here, even though they’re basically the same word.’ (words like きく and おさめる and なおす and so on and so forth).
What I’m getting at is that the written language is first and foremost a representation (and approximation?) of spoken language.
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