Usefulness Of Japanese Synonyms

20 March 2025

Lingofiles #1 - The Usefulness of Synonyms in Japanese

This is a new "series" I'm starting because I want to get back into writing on here. It won't be especially well-researched, or even mediocrely researched like my last language piece, but it's just for a little fun, really.

The Usefulness of Synonyms in Japanese

Applications of Kanji

Many people gripe and moan about kanji in Japanese. They're intricate, challenging to write, and daunting to read when you're getting started in Japanese, having just gotten the hang of the kana syllabaries. Personally, I think these chinese imports are great, and actually make things pretty efficient.

For the most part, kanji in Japanese are used for content words, i.e. nouns, adjectives, verbs. Grammar words, like verb stems, determiners, particles, seem to overwhelmingly[^1] be written in kana, even in the many cases where there is a kanji equivalent (e.g. まで - 迄 mada, meaing until). Thanks to this, and because japanese is written without space-separated words, it is incredibly easy when reading Japanese to know when a character is part of a content word, or if it's a mere morpheme. To someone unfamiliar with the script, this fact may not have been so obvious, but there are pretty practical reasons for using kanji. Of course, this benefit can easily be made moot if kana-only sentences were written with spaces separating words. Of course, this is not standard, and even when a sentence is written mostly in kana, there are no spaces separating each word. In a lot of my reading material in my class, especially early on, the difficulty was not particularly in reading the characters, but parsing what word they belonged to, because the author had written them in kana for simplicity, ironically making the text harder to read.

Kanji Features[^2]

OK, so before I go too deep into my main point, I feel like I need to lay out a couple stepping stones for how I got there. To keep it brief, I'm just going to explain a few groundwork structures of kanji. There exists generally four categories of kanji with regard to their onyomi (Chinese reading): those that express concrete things (e.g. 雨 rain, droplets of rain falling from the sky), those that express abstract ideas (一、二、三 1, 2, 3), those with one semantic component paired with a purely phonetic component ( 語 language, word (言 provides semantic aspect of "language" + 吾 provides phonetic aspect go)), and finally, those that "tell a story" by combining multiple abstract idea characters into one to form a more semantically complex character (休(人 person + 木 tree) = rest ). What interests us today is this last category, because just like how new meanings can be generated from merging two semantic components into one character, by joining different characters together, we can create compound words, or even sets of compounds easily.

Kanji Synonyms

I promised synonyms, so here's where I'll talk about kanji and their meanings. Japanese is a very fun language, and you can seemingly create new words by just mashing multiple kanji together: | Kanji | Reading in Kana | Reading in Roman Characters | Gloss | | ----- | --------------- | --------------------------- | ----- | | 大 | たい | tai | 'big' | | 変 | へん | hen | 'strange' | | 大変 | たいへん | taihen | 'very', 'enormous', 'grave', 'difficult' |

I consider this to be an especially productive feature of the language. Granted, from this example it doesn't seem like the resulting word is a perfect merger of the parent kanji, and on the subject of kanji productivity, of course, kanji is dead in terms of word invention, which is generally restricted to kana.

Let's consider a second case of related words - reword

adult - otona, tainin child - kodomo, shounin, shounen middle-aged child = chuunin passenger fares, admission fees, etc

Footnotes

[^1]: from my personal, very limited experience as a beginner

[^2]: Thanks to Morg's excellent writeup on this topic over at morg.systems for helping me get the details of this section adequately accurate.