Phonetic Complement - in Japanese

In Japanese

As in Akkadian, Japanese borrowed a logographic script, Chinese, designed for a very different language. The Chinese phonetic components built into these kanji do not work when they are pronounced in Japanese, and there is not a one-to-one relationship between them and the Japanese words they represent.

For example, the kanji 生, pronounced shō or sei in borrowed Chinese vocabulary, stands for several native Japanese words as well. When these words have inflectional endings (verbs/adjectives and adverbs), the end of the stem is written phonetically:

• 生 nama 'raw' or ki 'alive'
• 生う o-u 'expand'
• 生きる i-kiru 'live'
• 生かす i-kasu 'arrange'
• 生ける i-keru 'live'
• 生む　 u-mu 'produce'
• 生まれる or 生れる u-mareru or uma-reru 'be born'
• 生える ha-eru 'grow' (intransitive)
• 生やす ha-yasu 'grow' (transitive)

as well as the hybrid Chinese-Japanese word

• 生じる shō-jiru 'occur'

Note that some of these verbs share a kanji reading (i, u, and ha), and okurigana are conventionally picked to maximize these sharings.

These phonetic characters are called okurigana. They are used even when the inflection of the stem can be determined by a following inflectional suffix, so the primary function of okurigana for many kanji is that of a phonetic complement.

Generally it is the final syllable containing the inflectional ending is written phonetically. However, in adjectival verbs ending in -shii, and in those verbs ending in -ru in which this syllable drops in derived nouns, the final two syllables are written phonetically. There are also irregularities. For example, the word umareru 'be born' is derived from umu 'to bear, to produce'. As such, it may be written 生まれる, reflecting its derivation, or 生れる, as with other verbs ending in elidable ru.

Occasionally okurigana coincide with the phonetic (rebus) component of phono-semantic Chinese characters, which reflects that they fill the same role of phonetic complement. For example, in the word 割り算 (warizan, division), the phonetic component of 割 is 刂, which is cognate to the okurigana り, which is derived from 利, which also uses 刂.