Are all kanji compounds considered words?


A friend once commented to me that Japanese has a larger vocabulary than
English. I said I didn't think it did, because it wasn't really accurate to
call all kanji compounds "words". My friend said I was crazy.

Words like `新車【しんしゃ】(new car)` and `愛車【あいしゃ】(one's own car / "beloved" car)`
are in the dictionary, but... aren't they really just the application of
prefixes to the word "car"?

Put another way, in English I wouldn't consider "neopragmatism" it's own word,
it's just the addition of the prefix "neo" to the word "pragmatism". (I don't
even know if it's in the dictionary or not and won't look it up, because my
point is that as a native/fluent English speaker, I can stick 'em together if
I want, dictionary be damned!) Aren't some kanji compounds the same kind of
thing... not really words, but just obvious in meaning when combined
correctly?

Put yet another way, if one were trying to learn Japanese vocabulary, it would
be ridiculous to have a list that included all the possible kanji combinations
that get used in the real world. It's more efficient to learn a concept like
`新` as a prefix and you instantly have potential understanding of many kanji
compounds - `新語【しんご】(new word)`, `新貨【しんか】(new currency)`, `新地【しんち】(new
territory)`, etc...

So, is any valid kanji compound really considered its own word in some kind of
official or commonly understood sense, or are some kanji compounds considered
merely "combinations"?

If I combine kanji in some new and useful way, have I invented a new word, or
am I merely using the kanji in the Lego-like combinative way they're intended
to be used?

Another way I might ask is, do Japanese consider "words" and "combinations" as
separate things?




I ran across this paper today (via
[languagehat](http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004351.php)): "[The
indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and
syntax](http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/staff/haspelmath/pdf/WordSegmentation.pdf)",
by Martin Haspelmath. It's a bit technical, but the boiled-down summary is
that it is difficult to define "word" such that the concept is applicable and
useful to all languages. (Some linguists might disagree; I tend towards
sympathy with Haspelmath's view.)

So there is no "official or commonly understood sense" that we can appeal to
here -- or rather, there are lots, and which one we choose depends on what we
want to do with it. One simple pragmatic rule of thumb would be to say that a
"word" is what's in the dictionary. In English, this means that things like
"New York" and "neoclassical" are indeed words, and in Japanese it would mean
that the commonly accepted kanji compounds are words and the rest are not. But
I guess you don't like this answer, because otherwise you wouldn't have needed
to ask the question.

> If I combine kanji in some new and useful way, have I invented a new word,
> or am I merely using the kanji in the Lego-like combinative way they're
> intended to be used?

The second half of this sentence kind of begs the question, I think: the way
they're "intended to be used"? (Intended by who?) What I would say is this:
when you combine kanji that aren't habitually combined that way, you _are_ ,
in most cases, inventing a new word. The reason for this is simple: simply
cramming Sino-Japanese morphemes together like that does not result in an
unremarkable sentence, even if your meaning is crystal clear. People will
notice what you're doing and consider it unusual. Thus, it's more akin to
saying "blueplate" than "blue plate" in English. And this is leaving aside any
consideration of accent, etc. (Note: I'm using "kanji" here but of course what
I mean is "morpheme that is associated with a particular kanji".)

(Sidebar: We might want to exclude cases where you combine groups of kanji
that are already words in their own right, e.g. 階級 "class" ＋ 意識
"consciousness" = 階級意識 "class consciousness". On the other hand, we might want
to consider this a long-ass four-kanji word; just because we segment it into
two words in English doesn't mean it has to be that way -- in German it's
_Klassenbewusstsein_ , which is clearly made up of _Klasse(n)_ "class" +
_Bewusstsein_ "consciousness" in the same way.)

Now, some morphemes-that-happen-to-be-associated-with-kanji are "better at"
making new words than others. That is, you can attach 新- or 超- to pretty much
anything and as long as an obvious meaning is apparent, most people will go
with it. Some, like -的 and -中, attach so easily that you might indeed question
whether the results are "words" as such. If you wanted to argue that many
compounds created spontaneously with -的 weren't "real words", and you accepted
that this means that words like "lion-like" in English also aren't "real
words", then I won't disagree with you. (I might have doubts about the
usefulness of that definition of "word", but that's a different topic.)

However! Kanji that can be freely recombined like this are very much in the
minority. You are free to invent any word you like, of course, but that
doesn't mean that you can expect people to understand it. English is pretty
flexible, too, but I still can't go around saying "Blueplate the whitenings
before you exroom later," even if it would be obvious what I meant from
context.

So whether you call clusters of kanji "words" or "combinations", some clusters
are going to be more acceptable than others, and people do have to learn those
clusters by rote. It's true that you can often figure out the meaning from the
kanji, so that if you haven't encountered a word before you can make a good
guess at what it means -- but it doesn't work the other way round. If you have
a concept you want to express, and you don't know the word for it, you can't
just throw kanji together and expect the result to be accepted without
comment. You have to say it in other words that you already know.

(It's the same in English: Even if you know the morphemes "tele-" and
"vision", how are you supposed to know that that's how you say "television"
instead of "electro-opticon" or something? You aren't; you can't. Knowing the
morphemes helps you figure out what new words you encounter mean, but it
doesn't help you figure out what combinations are actual words.)

And so, with the exception of easily-combining kanji like 新 and so on, you
really do need to learn all the words you want to _use_ , one by one. You can
only reliably get away with guessing from first kanji principles when it comes
to _passive_ tasks, like reading. (And even then, every so often you will make
a mistake, because the meaning of some multi-kanji compounds just isn't
transparent.)

> Another way I might ask is, do Japanese consider "words" and "combinations"
> as separate things?

I don't know if this question is really answerable... until this question I
wouldn't have thought that any English speaker would reject "neopragmatism" as
an independent word, so clearly speakers of the same language can disagree on
seemingly basic concepts like this.

But in the vast majority of cases, if you make up some combination of kanji
that is meaningful to you and ask a Japanese speaker "is this a word?", then
unless it's in the dictionary (and they know it) they will say "no", and if
you ask them the same question about a compound that you know to exist, they
will almost certainly say "yes". If you press them on the "no", they might
expand their answer to "well, I can see how you mean X by that compound; I
guess it's a word now that you've coined it," but the point is, we don't have
anywhere near absolute freedom to mix and match if we want to stay within the
bounds of "standard Japanese" rather than "psychedelic poetry."

**Edit:** Dave sez in comments:

> I think your very last statement that deviating from standard Japanese lands
> you right into psychedelic poetry goes off the mark. Languages, and the
> people that use them, invent new words and uses all the time, which is how
> languages evolve as a matter of course.

Let me address this because it is a fair point. "Psychedelic poetry" was an
exaggeration, yeah. It's absolutely true that new words are invented as a
matter of course in language. The question isn't "Can words be invented or
not?", it's "How much invention, and of what sort, can one get away with?" And
the answer is determined by both cultural and personal factors:

**Cultural:** So as we all know, from at least the late Edo period through to
the early Showa period, Japan was importing a bunch of concepts from foreign,
notably European sources. They didn't have words for these concepts, so they
invented new ones, and they often did it with kanji compounds, e.g. 競争 for
"contest", 自由 for "free", 彼女 for "her" _(women weren't a new concept, of
course, but the highly European style of pronoun use was)_. So back then, you
could get away with quite a lot of invention, although of course your newly
coined word would have a certain nuance of foreignness.

But, after WWII, the pendulum swung hugely towards importing foreign concepts
using phonetic loans (in katakana). This is why we say コンピューター instead of 電脳
or whatever. And as a result of this swing, it became less normal to invent
kanji compounds, and so new kanji compounds became more noticeable and "odd".

Sidenote 1: There was also a reaction against foreign influence (historically,
more about the early Chinese influence) in the shape of the
[Kokugaku](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokugaku) school. They often coined
new words using native Japanese vocabulary to replace existing Sino-Japanese
words, and these new words had a distinctly "Kokugaku" feel. So even the
cultural factors are not absolute; they depend on specific circumstances.

Sidenote 2: You can compare this kanji-compound frenzy with the use of Latin
and Greek vocabulary to invent new scientific and engineering terms in
English, back when modern science was new and had to name all these new ideas
it was discovering.

**Personal:** The other thing about the "getting away with" concept is that it
will depend on how different you can handle being. If you (not you personally,
Dave, the general "you") are okay with everyone thinking of you as someone who
invents new words all the time, and you think that the possible negative
effects of this (people thinking you're a weirdo for not speaking "normally",
work clients mistaking your creativity for simple error, etc.) are outweighed
by the benefits of being able to say awesome things, then you will be able to
"get away with" a lot more than someone who doesn't want to stand out that way
and therefore has to stick to words that already exist.

And this, too, is not absolute: it's very common for families, both English-
and Japanese-speaking and presumably everywhere else, to have their own
jargon: words they invented or modified that everyone in the family
understands but that no-one would dream of using outside the family, or expect
anyone outside the family to accept as a "real word" (even if the meaning is
quite clear).

So I guess what I'm saying is, I don't disagree with you that new words are
invented all the time and there is no absolute prohibition against it. It may
even be true that Japanese is more flexible in this regard than English
because kanji are perceived as "modular". But there are still many factors,
often changing drastically over time, which condition the relative "social
acceptability" of different kinds of word-coining.




I ran across this paper today (via
[languagehat](http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004351.php)): "[The
indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and
syntax](http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/staff/haspelmath/pdf/WordSegmentation.pdf)",
by Martin Haspelmath. It's a bit technical, but the boiled-down summary is
that it is difficult to define "word" such that the concept is applicable and
useful to all languages. (Some linguists might disagree; I tend towards
sympathy with Haspelmath's view.)

So there is no "official or commonly understood sense" that we can appeal to
here -- or rather, there are lots, and which one we choose depends on what we
want to do with it. One simple pragmatic rule of thumb would be to say that a
"word" is what's in the dictionary. In English, this means that things like
"New York" and "neoclassical" are indeed words, and in Japanese it would mean
that the commonly accepted kanji compounds are words and the rest are not. But
I guess you don't like this answer, because otherwise you wouldn't have needed
to ask the question.

> If I combine kanji in some new and useful way, have I invented a new word,
> or am I merely using the kanji in the Lego-like combinative way they're
> intended to be used?

The second half of this sentence kind of begs the question, I think: the way
they're "intended to be used"? (Intended by who?) What I would say is this:
when you combine kanji that aren't habitually combined that way, you _are_ ,
in most cases, inventing a new word. The reason for this is simple: simply
cramming Sino-Japanese morphemes together like that does not result in an
unremarkable sentence, even if your meaning is crystal clear. People will
notice what you're doing and consider it unusual. Thus, it's more akin to
saying "blueplate" than "blue plate" in English. And this is leaving aside any
consideration of accent, etc. (Note: I'm using "kanji" here but of course what
I mean is "morpheme that is associated with a particular kanji".)

(Sidebar: We might want to exclude cases where you combine groups of kanji
that are already words in their own right, e.g. 階級 "class" ＋ 意識
"consciousness" = 階級意識 "class consciousness". On the other hand, we might want
to consider this a long-ass four-kanji word; just because we segment it into
two words in English doesn't mean it has to be that way -- in German it's
_Klassenbewusstsein_ , which is clearly made up of _Klasse(n)_ "class" +
_Bewusstsein_ "consciousness" in the same way.)

Now, some morphemes-that-happen-to-be-associated-with-kanji are "better at"
making new words than others. That is, you can attach 新- or 超- to pretty much
anything and as long as an obvious meaning is apparent, most people will go
with it. Some, like -的 and -中, attach so easily that you might indeed question
whether the results are "words" as such. If you wanted to argue that many
compounds created spontaneously with -的 weren't "real words", and you accepted
that this means that words like "lion-like" in English also aren't "real
words", then I won't disagree with you. (I might have doubts about the
usefulness of that definition of "word", but that's a different topic.)

However! Kanji that can be freely recombined like this are very much in the
minority. You are free to invent any word you like, of course, but that
doesn't mean that you can expect people to understand it. English is pretty
flexible, too, but I still can't go around saying "Blueplate the whitenings
before you exroom later," even if it would be obvious what I meant from
context.

So whether you call clusters of kanji "words" or "combinations", some clusters
are going to be more acceptable than others, and people do have to learn those
clusters by rote. It's true that you can often figure out the meaning from the
kanji, so that if you haven't encountered a word before you can make a good
guess at what it means -- but it doesn't work the other way round. If you have
a concept you want to express, and you don't know the word for it, you can't
just throw kanji together and expect the result to be accepted without
comment. You have to say it in other words that you already know.

(It's the same in English: Even if you know the morphemes "tele-" and
"vision", how are you supposed to know that that's how you say "television"
instead of "electro-opticon" or something? You aren't; you can't. Knowing the
morphemes helps you figure out what new words you encounter mean, but it
doesn't help you figure out what combinations are actual words.)

And so, with the exception of easily-combining kanji like 新 and so on, you
really do need to learn all the words you want to _use_ , one by one. You can
only reliably get away with guessing from first kanji principles when it comes
to _passive_ tasks, like reading. (And even then, every so often you will make
a mistake, because the meaning of some multi-kanji compounds just isn't
transparent.)

> Another way I might ask is, do Japanese consider "words" and "combinations"
> as separate things?

I don't know if this question is really answerable... until this question I
wouldn't have thought that any English speaker would reject "neopragmatism" as
an independent word, so clearly speakers of the same language can disagree on
seemingly basic concepts like this.

But in the vast majority of cases, if you make up some combination of kanji
that is meaningful to you and ask a Japanese speaker "is this a word?", then
unless it's in the dictionary (and they know it) they will say "no", and if
you ask them the same question about a compound that you know to exist, they
will almost certainly say "yes". If you press them on the "no", they might
expand their answer to "well, I can see how you mean X by that compound; I
guess it's a word now that you've coined it," but the point is, we don't have
anywhere near absolute freedom to mix and match if we want to stay within the
bounds of "standard Japanese" rather than "psychedelic poetry."

**Edit:** Dave sez in comments:

> I think your very last statement that deviating from standard Japanese lands
> you right into psychedelic poetry goes off the mark. Languages, and the
> people that use them, invent new words and uses all the time, which is how
> languages evolve as a matter of course.

Let me address this because it is a fair point. "Psychedelic poetry" was an
exaggeration, yeah. It's absolutely true that new words are invented as a
matter of course in language. The question isn't "Can words be invented or
not?", it's "How much invention, and of what sort, can one get away with?" And
the answer is determined by both cultural and personal factors:

**Cultural:** So as we all know, from at least the late Edo period through to
the early Showa period, Japan was importing a bunch of concepts from foreign,
notably European sources. They didn't have words for these concepts, so they
invented new ones, and they often did it with kanji compounds, e.g. 競争 for
"contest", 自由 for "free", 彼女 for "her" _(women weren't a new concept, of
course, but the highly European style of pronoun use was)_. So back then, you
could get away with quite a lot of invention, although of course your newly
coined word would have a certain nuance of foreignness.

But, after WWII, the pendulum swung hugely towards importing foreign concepts
using phonetic loans (in katakana). This is why we say コンピューター instead of 電脳
or whatever. And as a result of this swing, it became less normal to invent
kanji compounds, and so new kanji compounds became more noticeable and "odd".

Sidenote 1: There was also a reaction against foreign influence (historically,
more about the early Chinese influence) in the shape of the
[Kokugaku](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokugaku) school. They often coined
new words using native Japanese vocabulary to replace existing Sino-Japanese
words, and these new words had a distinctly "Kokugaku" feel. So even the
cultural factors are not absolute; they depend on specific circumstances.

Sidenote 2: You can compare this kanji-compound frenzy with the use of Latin
and Greek vocabulary to invent new scientific and engineering terms in
English, back when modern science was new and had to name all these new ideas
it was discovering.

**Personal:** The other thing about the "getting away with" concept is that it
will depend on how different you can handle being. If you (not you personally,
Dave, the general "you") are okay with everyone thinking of you as someone who
invents new words all the time, and you think that the possible negative
effects of this (people thinking you're a weirdo for not speaking "normally",
work clients mistaking your creativity for simple error, etc.) are outweighed
by the benefits of being able to say awesome things, then you will be able to
"get away with" a lot more than someone who doesn't want to stand out that way
and therefore has to stick to words that already exist.

And this, too, is not absolute: it's very common for families, both English-
and Japanese-speaking and presumably everywhere else, to have their own
jargon: words they invented or modified that everyone in the family
understands but that no-one would dream of using outside the family, or expect
anyone outside the family to accept as a "real word" (even if the meaning is
quite clear).

So I guess what I'm saying is, I don't disagree with you that new words are
invented all the time and there is no absolute prohibition against it. It may
even be true that Japanese is more flexible in this regard than English
because kanji are perceived as "modular". But there are still many factors,
often changing drastically over time, which condition the relative "social
acceptability" of different kinds of word-coining.

