Alternate Character Reading: Difference between revisions

While Japan has an indigenous language, it has no indigenous writing system. So when it voluntarily adopted the [[Chinese Language]]language in the seventh century, they were faced with two parallel sets of spoken vocabulary with only one set of writing system, i.e. kanji. And they didn't want any of the three to disappear.

To make things simple for the audience, the result of this is: kanji is taken for the meaning value only, as usual, and two parallel sets of rules were developed for the pronunciation: the ''on'yomi'' that plots to the Chinese pronunciation(s) of ''the kanji'', and the kun'yomi that plots to the indigenous Japanese pronunciation(s) for ''the same idea''. Moreover, Japanese for the most part dropped the tonal aspect from the (in)famously homophonous [[Chinese Language]]language.

A handful of Chinese characters actually possess multiple readings in [[Chinese Language|Chinese itself]], but this is rarely drawn on for puns. Interestingly, as Japanese adopted Chinese characters in the 7th century CE, they've preserved the pronounciation of a lot of Chinese as it was spoken back then. For this reason, Japanese is very useful for linguists trying to reconstruct Middle Chinese.