Why isn't there any "original" Japanese word for "page"?


In my last Japanese class, I asked my teacher, who is a native speaker, why
the Japanese word for "page" was taken from the English language ("pēji"),
because apparently there were already books ("hon"), who had a Japanese name.
My teacher could not answer me this. Is there a reason and, more important,
how did the Japanese people called a sheet of paper being part of a book?




頁 `おおがい`(ケツ or ヨウ) is used to indicate the pages in Kanji, which is quite rare
to see nowadays.

Originally, 「葉」-leaf (ヨウ) was said to be the unit of count for paper and in
Edo period we borrowed the kanji 頁 so to mean the pages because its Chinese
pronunciation is similar to ‘ヨウ’.

<http://kanjibunka.com/kanji-faq/old-faq/q0153/>

