Timeline for How many possible phonological forms could be represented by a randomly chosen single character?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 12, 2015 at 23:15 | comment | added | Williham Totland | Good stuff. For such a serious people, the Japanese certainly have a lot of fun with names, when they can be bothered. (田中村, anyone? Or is that "田中村: Everyone."?) | |
| Nov 12, 2015 at 23:02 | comment | added | Eiríkr Útlendi | @WillihamTotland, have a look at the 月見里 entry on Wiktionary. I hope I've captured the details appropriately. | |
| Nov 6, 2015 at 22:47 | comment | added | Nick Anderegg | And in regard to my comment on a finite number of phonological forms: I wasn't specifically referring to possible kanji readings, I was discussing words in general. While most languages technically have an infinite number of possible words, in reality, it's much more limited. English has roughly 15000 licit syllables, so there are theoretically well over 3x10^12 possible three syllable words. So for practical purposes, the maximum number of licit phonological forms is exactly equal to the number of words in Japanese! | |
| Nov 6, 2015 at 22:46 | comment | added | Williham Totland | 月見里 might be a pun. It's a village from which you can see the moon, because there's no mountains (山無し). A similar construct is 小鳥遊 (たかなし、鷹無し), little birds play because there are no hawks. | |
| Nov 6, 2015 at 22:39 | comment | added | Nick Anderegg | I think this really helps clarify some points for me! I've made another edit with a really detailed explanation of my question, but here's the tl;dr: if Chinese reading went from visual character form to meaning by going through phonological form, there would be a massive bottleneck as >50k characters pass through 1k phonological forms to select among >100k meanings. Would the bottleneck in Japanese be as bad? Or would it be 50k characters passing through several thousand phonological forms to select among >100k meanings? | |
| Nov 6, 2015 at 22:12 | history | edited | Eiríkr Útlendi | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
+furigana fix
|
| Nov 6, 2015 at 21:37 | comment | added | user1478 | EiríkrÚtlendi, @Blavius It turns out it was a bug! meta.ell.stackexchange.com/questions/2616/2734#comment5700_2734 | |
| Nov 6, 2015 at 20:15 | history | edited | Eiríkr Útlendi | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 1 character in body
|
| Nov 6, 2015 at 20:13 | comment | added | Eiríkr Útlendi | That's ... a strange way to go about it, and annoying. Oh well. Thanks for the explanation! | |
| Nov 6, 2015 at 20:11 | comment | added | Blavius | I just found out that they updated the privilege system because we graduated, so now you need 10k to see deleted answers. | |
| Nov 6, 2015 at 20:10 | comment | added | Eiríkr Útlendi | And, ya, I've been able to see other deleted answers, so I don't know what's going on here. Weird. | |
| Nov 6, 2015 at 20:09 | comment | added | Eiríkr Útlendi | I think your post had good information. It might not have answered the full breadth of the question, but it was still interesting and probably something a reader would want to know: I myself wondered about that (the number of just on'yomi) as I was writing my post. | |
| Nov 6, 2015 at 20:07 | comment | added | Blavius | I deleted it because it was not what the OP was looking for. Should I undelete it? | |
| Nov 6, 2015 at 20:07 | history | edited | Eiríkr Útlendi | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 83 characters in body
|
| Nov 6, 2015 at 20:04 | comment | added | Eiríkr Útlendi | That's weird, @Blavius's answer has vanished. FWIW, he added a link (which I don't have) to a site stating that there are 335 on'yomi in current modern use. So the chances of a random on'yomi being correct for any given kanji would be 1/335. | |
| Nov 6, 2015 at 20:01 | history | answered | Eiríkr Útlendi | CC BY-SA 3.0 |