How many possible phonological forms could be represented by a randomly chosen single character?


In Chinese, every character is monosyllabic and Mandarin has a total of about
~1200 licit syllables including tone (about 400 if you don't count tone). This
means that if I take any Chinese character and randomly choose a Chinese
syllable, there is roughly a 1 in 1200 chance that that syllable will be the
correct pronunciation.

Now let's say I do the same thing with Japanese. I take any random Kanji
character and I randomly choose a full phonological form that can be
represented by a single character. What's the probability that the
pronunciation will be correct? This is a much more complicated question than
in Mandarin since a whole multi-syllabic word can be represented by a single
character, but like any language, there is a finite number of licit
phonological forms in Japanese. Are there any accurate estimates of this
number?

## Edit: To illustrate:

If I pick the character 鏡 then the phonemic form can be _kagami_. If I select
鵜, the phonemic form can be _u_. For 八, _hati_. I'm not particularly concerned
with the characters being used in a multi-character word, my primary concern
is solely with individual characters.

So if I pick the character 鏡 and then I randomly select from all of the full
phonological forms that can be represented by a single character, what is the
probability that I will correctly select _kagami_?

In Mandarin, because there are only 1200 syllables and characters are always
monosyllabic, if I pick a character with one possible pronunciation I have a 1
in 1200 chance of getting it correct. Some polyphonic syllables may have
multiple possible pronunciations so I could have a 2 in 1200 or 3 in 1200
chance of picking it correctly.

In Japanese, a character can represent a sequence of multiple syllables, so
what's the chance that out of the list of all possible phonological forms I'll
pick the one that consists of the correct sequence of syllables?

## Edit 2: Overly detailed reason for the question:

I'm researching cross-script differences in reading processes between English
and Chinese; here's a highly simplified explanation.

In English, readers mostly compute the sound of a word based on the letters
and use that computed phonological form to pick the semantic information
behind the word. Visual information play a smaller role, but it helps with
things like disambiguating homophones (e.g. "flower" and "flour"). A reader
sees "flower", computes /ˈflɑʊ.ə˞/, and activates the meaning ❀, maybe with
some help from visual information.

In Chinese, readers mostly retrieve semantic information directly from the
visual form. Phonological information plays a role, but it doesn't seem to be
the primary route of activation. A reader sees "花" and directly activates ❀.

Like I said, this is a super simplified explanation, but it covers the main
gist.

I want to approach this difference as having to do with the "usefulness" of
the different routes. In English, the visual information route isn't "useful"
because English speakers don't make direct associations between visual forms
and meaning.

In Chinese, one possibility is that the phonological route isn't "useful"
because that information is very non-specific. A Chinese speaker can read "书"
and know what it means with no context because the meaning is directly
associated with the visual character. However, if there wasn't that direct
association and the character simply activated "shū", it would be difficult to
retrieve a specific meaning with no context because that phonological form can
represent several dozen morphemes.

I'm trying to figure out if Japanese could be examined as a language kind of
"in between" these two. Chinese _cannot_ use a purely phonological route to
get from any one of tens of thousands of characters to any one of hundreds of
thousands of meanings, because you would have to connect them through a
thousand or so phonological forms, forming a serious cognitive bottleneck. If
Japanese can get from any one of tens of thousands of characters to any one of
hundreds of thousands of meanings by going through several thousand possible
phonological forms, Japanese could potentially have better success with the
phonological route.

The question basically comes down to this: is the bottleneck from form to
meaning through phonology in Japanese nearly as bad as it is in Chinese?




I am not aware of any such analysis that looks at the full breadth of Japanese
character readings. Some background first.

### Background detail

Kanji have been used very _flexibly_ , both historically and currently, with
examples such as the historical 木乃伊【みいら】, where the spelling comes from
Chinese and the reading comes from Portuguese _mirra_ or Dutch _mirre_
("myrrh"), or 猟虎【らっこ】, where the spelling is vaguely phonetic and the reading
comes from Ainu; or the modern 騎士【ないと】, where the spelling comes from Chinese
and the reading comes from English _knight_. This flexibility is a wonderful
feature of the written language, and is a big part of why furigana exist. You
will see numerous examples of this phenomenon (where the reading and spelling
basically come from different words) in many (most?) manga series.

There are also numerous cases where a reading from one term is later applied
to a completely different spelling. A couple firmly-established examples of
this kind of reading/spelling shift include:

  * 玉蜀黍【とうもろこし】, where the spelling was coined in Japan using Chinese characters based on their meaning, and the reading comes from older Japanese terms 唐【とう】 referring to foreign goods + 唐黍【もろこし】 referring to sorghum.
  * 美人【かおよびと】, where the reading actually derives from 顔【かお】 + 良【よ】 + 人【ひと】.
  * 月見里【やまなし】, where the spelling apparently came from the old name for a place, and the reading came from the new name.

As extreme examples, there are also cases where a given kanji compound
spelling uses a reading where the phonemes cannot be cleanly apportioned to
the individual kanji characters. Examples include 啄木鳥【けら】 " _woodpecker_ " or
胡頽子【ぐみ】 " _silverberry, oleaster_ ". These are rare, but they exist. (FWIW,
this phenomenon also exists in Chinese -- where a multi-character spelling
might have a single-syllable reading.)

Looking just at single-character readings, there is still a huge range of
possibilities. One factor is that okurigana (the kana after the kanji on the
end of a native-Japanese word, used to show inflection) can optionally be left
unwritten. 始 could represent the native-Japanese readings _haji_ , _hajime_ ,
_hajima_ , or even _hajimari_ , depending on the written context. Similarly, 志
might be _kokoroza_ or _kokorozashi_.

### Fluidity

Assuming that someone somewhere has done this kind of reading count for
Japanese, it is important to note that any such number would not be a
constant: new phonological forms, new readings, can be added to and used for
kanji spellings, such as _naito_ above. How "correct" these new readings are
considered is a different question, and partly just a matter of how popular
and longstanding any such additional reading might be.

I think your underlying assumption here is flawed:

> ... but like any language, there is a finite number of licit phonological
> forms in Japanese.

While Japanese does have a finite number of _phones_ (i.e. sounds), kanji
readings are not limited to this small number. Moreover, as illustrated some
above, kanji readings are not as fixed as they are in Chinese, and they keep
changing.

### Conclusions

To reduce complexity, let us assume just the fixed set of readings listed in
current dictionaries, and evaluate your core query:

> I take any random Kanji character and I randomly choose a full phonological
> form that can be represented by a single character. What's the probability
> that the pronunciation will be correct?

As Blavius notes in his post, the range of _on'yomi_ readings is reasonably
small, increasing the probability of an accurate random guess.

However, your question seems to be asking about the full range of Japanese
terms and readings. Including _kun'yomi_ in the mix greatly expands the scope.
The sheer number of " _full phonological form[s] that can be represented by a
single character_ " is huge, probably orders of magnitude larger than the
corresponding set of " _full phonological form[s]_ " for Chinese. This
**vastly** reduces the likelihood of a random match between character and
reading. I'm not sure what that probability would be, but it's a vanishingly
small number.

