furikanji

I just caught a bit on an NHK program about the Japanese language that
brought up an interesting point. Anybody know how to read the second of the
following two words?

大人
小人

They started asking a bunch of Japanese on the street and got a lot of
people scratching their heads and coming up with all kinds of responses. The
answers included shounin, kojin, kodomo, and my favorite, kotona. Nobody
seemed very confident in their answer. The answer is, there is no correct
way of reading it. It's an example of a word that exists in kanji, is
commonly used, conveys meaning, but has no particular reading. Another
example of this kind of word that was given was 白飯. The scholar on the
show who discussed this phenomenon referred to these as furikanji. However,
I got the sense he was being cute with terminology, so this may not be an
official word (indeed, it isn't in the Daijirin.)

Ben, this phenomenon might make an interesting addition to your set of faqs
if we could come up with a decent sized collection of them. Can anyone think
of any others?

Jeff

.

Relevant Pages

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