I'm curious as to what the percentage of native Japanese words that contain digraphs, or to put it another way, the average number of digraphs (or individual kana) in a Japanese word would be. I'm a big math nerd, so as I'm learning Japanese this popped into my head.
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3I am curious what the term “digraph” refers to in the context of hiragana, which is a syllabary and not an alphabet. Things like きゃ, きゅ, きょ, etc?– aguijonazoMar 15 at 6:34
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3The term digraph is usually used for sequences that together tend to represent a sound, for example <ch>, <sh>, <th> in English. I'm not aware that Japanese consider sequences such as きゃ, しゃ, ちゅ to be digraphs though. Perhaps you can clarify what you intend by "digraph".– jogloranMar 15 at 7:33
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1@jogloran You are both on the right track, in that I do mean things likeりゃ、りゅ、りょ– JShoeMar 15 at 13:54
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For that you would need to get a comprehensive list of words from somewhere and somehow extract only "native" words. Excluding recent loan words might be easy because they use katakana. Do you also need to exclude 漢語?– aguijonazoMar 15 at 22:20
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1 Answer
From a 68,000 word dictionary, I counted 22,000 words whose readings include one, or more, of 「っ, ゃ, ゅ, ょ」. Unfortunately, I triple-counted unusual words like 出張(しゅっちょう). 「ょ」was in 11,000 of the words while「ゃ」was in just 2,200. I ignored all katakana.
