Sino-Japanese Vocabulary - Sino-Japanese and On'yomi

Sino-Japanese and On'yomi

The term kango is usually identified with on'yomi (音読み, "sound reading"), a system of pronouncing Chinese characters in a way that at one stage approximated the original Chinese. On'yomi is also known as the 'Sino-Japanese reading', and is opposed to kun'yomi (訓読み, "reading by meaning") under which Chinese characters are assigned to, and read as, native Japanese vocabulary.

However, there are cases where the distinction between on'yomi and kun'yomi does not correspond to etymological origin. Chinese characters created in Japan, called kokuji (国字?), normally only have kun'yomi, but some kokuji have on'yomi. One such character is 働 (as in 働く hataraku, "to work"), which was given the on'yomi dō (from the on'yomi of its phonetic, 動) when used in compounds with other characters, e.g. 労働 rōdō ("labor"). The character 腺 ("gland"), which has the on'yomi sen (from the on'yomi of its phonetic, 泉), e.g. 扁桃腺 hentōsen "tonsils", was intentionally created as a 'kango' and does not have a kun'yomi at all. Although not originating in Chinese, both of these are regarded as 'Sino-Japanese'.

By the same token, kun-yomi is not a guarantee that a word is native Japanese. There are a few Japanese words that, although they appear to have originated in borrowings from Chinese, have such a long history in the Japanese language that they are regarded as native and are thus treated as kun'yomi, e.g., 馬 uma "horse" and 梅 ume. These words are not regarded as belonging to the Sino-Japanese vocabulary.