Okurigana - English Analogs

English Analogs

Analogous orthographic conventions find occasional use in English, which, being more familiar, help in understanding okurigana.

As an inflection example, when writing Xing for cross-ing, as in Ped Xing (pedestrian crossing), the -ing is a verb suffix, while cross is the dictionary form of the verb – in this case cross is the reading of the character X, while -ing is analogous to okurigana. By contrast, in the noun Xmas for Christmas, the character X is instead read as Christ – the suffixes serve as phonetic complements to indicate which reading to use.

Another common example is in ordinal and cardinal numbers – "1" is read as one, while "1st" is read as fir-st.

Note that word, morpheme (constituent part of word), and reading may be distinct: in "1", "one" is at once the word, the morpheme, and the reading, while in "1st", the word and the morpheme are "first", while the reading is fir, as the -st is written separately, and in "Xmas" the word is "Christmas" while the morphemes are Christ and -mas, and the reading "Christ" coincides with the first morpheme.