Template talk:ja-kanji reading

WT:AJA includes a section about #Non-lemma_forms that looks obsolete and sorely in need of reworking/removal. This section advocates various editing techniques that have been obsoleted for a while, such as manually formatted headlines and non-standard headers.

is part of this confusion that needs cleaning up. This template has no purpose given our current standards, to wit: to classify each JA term under the appropriate part of speech, in line with all other language entries (at least, that I'm aware of). Doing so also does away with at least some the problem of Japanese entries listed under Category:Entries with non-standard headers.

I therefore propose orphaning and deleting it. We should rework all entries that use this template to instead place each term under the correct POS. I have already started this process, such as with these two edits.

If any other JA editors have objections, I'm all ears. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:40, 12 February 2013 (UTC)


 * D —Michael Z. 2013-02-12 18:42 z 
 * I have no objections. It's true that those entries are all old and they have been dead for a long time.  It would be kind of cool to be able to find kanji by readings on here, but that can all be done automatically using data already on entries with Kanji sections.  That's another project for another day, not one for humans, and not really what WT is about right now.  --Haplology (talk) 06:16, 15 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Haplology, how do you mean "It would be kind of cool to be able to find kanji by readings on here"? If you mean looking up a reading for an individual character, and finding all the characters with that reading listed and linked to from a single entry, that's actually one of my goals too -- and part of the background to why I nominated this template for deletion.  If all single kanji are also referred to from the appropriate hira (and possibly rom?) entries for each reading, would that fulfill your comment?  Eg, you'd find links to  from the, , , and  pages, while the  page would also link to the , , , , , , , , and  pages (and any others that I've left out), etc. etc.  -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 20:35, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm confused. What I think you mean to propose is that under every ==Japanese== header, there appear only subheaders which are a part of speech, Romanization, or Kanji, which would mean that every ===Kanji reading=== subsection would disappear.  In that case, unless I'm mistaken, you couldn't find 開 in かい.  Clever people can just go to Special:WhatLinksHere/%E3%81%8B%E3%81%84 of course.  --Haplology (talk) 02:18, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Re:  disappearing, yes, I would like to see that disappear.
 * Re:, my thought is that, yes, actually, that should be listed under . The POS would presumably be  , as this is not used in isolation, but as prefix, suffix, or infix.  See  for an example of how that might work.  -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 05:05, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I think we're in agreement on the proposal, which I take to be removing the template ja-kanji reading and the section ===Kanji reading . I am still confused about the rest.  Maybe 開 was a bad example.  My point was that there are some kanji readings which cannot be listed under a part of speech.  Many of the kanji entries here lack definitions completely, including lot of other kanji entries that list たく as a reading, like 杔.  There are many other kanji that can be read たく, so are they not affixes?  How can you tell the difference?  I have never heard of infixes in Japanese before.  I thought that many words were borrowed straight from China, not first borrowed as affixes and then assembled.  In any case I'm more interested in working on plain old nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. and generally in words which are widely used by people living today.  If "Kanji readings" is to be replaced by something, that's another discussion for another page.  --Haplology (talk) 08:28, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Apologies, I did not mean to suggest that the entry is complete, so yes,  should be added there.  I'll do so later today, time allowing.  The lack of the  kanji on the  page is no indication that I think  should not be included there, and is instead simply an indication that I didn't get around to listing every kanji that can be read as .  I may do so tonight or later this week when I have my copy of Nelson's to hand.
 * My thought is that all kanji under a given reading that are used as prefixes, such as, would be listed as prefixes, while all kanji under a given reading that are used as suffixes, such as , would be listed as suffixes. Some kanji are never used in isolation for a given reading, like , and are variously used either at the start of a compound as in , or at the end of a compound as in .  Such kanji have inherent meaning, but as they are never standalone, I settled on the   header.  This is partly influenced by the Kokugo Dai Jiten's use in some entries of the  POS marker.  If you or anyone else has a better idea for POS header, I'm open to suggestions.
 * Re: infixes, you're right about kanji, in that compounds are constructed in units of one or two kanji, so there's never anything to be in the middle of. I misspoke (miswrote?) in the context of my post above.  Looking more broadly at Japanese as a whole, whether an element is an infix depends on your point of view in analysis.  By some analyses, the  or  that appear in passive verb forms, or the  or  that appear in causative verb forms, could all be considered as infixes, followed by  in the plain form or  in the polite form.  Others take the view that the entire passive endings  and  or causative endings  and  are integral units that then inflect to take the  ending.  I lean toward the former view, in part as all the JA<>JA dictionaries I've looked at treat  as an auxiliary verb.
 * Re: assembling new words from kanji, that happens from time to time. The term  is one such example.  Even kanji words we think of as basic and common, such as  or, were coined in Japan (in these specific cases, as part of the  movement in the 1700-1800s, where Japanese scholars worked to translate western texts into Japanese).  Putting kanji together in new ways allows for all kinds of fun productive word formation.  We see tons of that in manga; some of our more eager IP anons have been known to pepper our lists of new entries with such creative neologisms.  Whether these stick around long enough to meet WT:CFI is another matter.  :)  -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 17:24, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for explaining it. I think I understand now.  I'll follow your lead on this one.  It seems like a massive project and this is an area I'm not familiar with so for the time being I'll focus on other parts of speech at least until there's a certain amount of stability in how to write these sections.  If a complete dictionary has 200,000 entries, WT is 25% complete with respect to Japanese, and I'd like to focus on that 75% for now and get widespread coverage with an acceptable level of quality, and then drill down deeper following that.  This is an interesting project though so please keep me posted.
 * This makes me think: perhaps definitions of kanji should go under a similar Affix section, rather than right under the Kanji section? For some time I have been removing the defn tag under kanji when there is a definition in any part of speech, but I have been wondering if that was the wrong thing to do.  Perhaps every Kanji section should include glosses, and the defn template was a placeholder or those.  Or should none of them have glosses, and all of them have an Affix section?  --Haplology (talk) 05:49, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

RFD discussion: June 2017–July 2018
An earlier discussion (Template talk:ja-kanji reading) appears to have been closed inappropriately as a "keep"; all participants agreed to its deletion. —suzukaze (t・c) 06:26, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Pinging. —suzukaze (t・c) 06:27, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Looks like the discussion was never closed and WF inappropriately archived it without action. I would just delete the template, but it seems that it's still in use. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 04:35, 18 July 2017 (UTC)


 * I've started slowly going through all the pages linking to the template, and editing as appropriate to orphan it. We're down now to 135 links (including redirects).  ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 18:39, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

I manually removed a large number of them using my bot account, then marked some entries for deletion using my normal account since they had only. I changed into a stub for. I also removed it from. —suzukaze (t・c) 04:14, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

I marked more related pages for deletion that didn't use this template. had the header and was a definition-less stub that you created. —suzukaze (t・c) 07:48, 27 December 2017 (UTC)


 * See also Talk:えう (currently at RFD). —Suzukaze-c◆◆ 01:39, 8 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Finally RFDO failed. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 05:57, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

Use "definitions" instead of "affix" for on'yomi terms of one kanji
One-kanji on'yomi terms tend to have multiple parts of speech sharing a single definition. For example, can be used as an affix, a suffix, or a standalone noun. This would require three POS headers and headword lines duplicating the same definition, making the entry messy.

Inspired by the Chinese entry layout for single characters, I would like to propose using the "Definitions" POS header to group all definitions, and using labels to indicate the POS, like this:

For single on'yomi kanji deriving sa-hen verbs, such as, we can also have labels like “  verb  ”.

How do you think of such a format?

--Dine2016 (talk) 04:41, 26 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I am OK with this format. Please note that also use a different method to categories entries, since there are no headwords for each character. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 04:50, 26 May 2019 (UTC)


 * No particular opinion yet. —Suzukaze-c◇◇ 05:02, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

I am against merging different lexical classes just because of orthography. Some kanji can be suffixes, some don’t. 愛 can be a suffix while 情 can’t. Their meaning can be different too. For example, the noun 性 means “sex” while the suffix 性 means “-ity”. In addition, as I have explained in User talk:Eirikr/Archive 2011-2012, the verbs of a single on-reading kanji like 生じる, 愛する are undividable and lexically single units. They should not be listed under a kanji. The lack of suppletion by できる in possible forms and the lack of ellipsis indicate they are single units. — T AKASUGI Shinji (talk) 05:42, 26 May 2019 (UTC)
 * : User:Dine2016 used a bad example of a suru-verb. would perhaps be a better single kanji example where you could define the verb sense with # (~) to snore  verb  --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 05:55, 26 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your reply, but my proposal only applies to on'yomi of single kanji, not kun'yomi. --Dine2016 (talk) 06:19, 26 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your reply. I agree that and  should have their own entry. The “ verb” part merely links to them. If it is too eye-distracting we can remove it and links to the derived verbs in the "Derived terms" section below the definitions.
 * As for, it is clearly an affix in and  but is it an affix or a suffix in  and ? The boundary between the POSes can be very vague for Sino-Japanese morphemes (one-kanji on'yomi terms). --Dine2016 (talk) 07:18, 26 May 2019 (UTC)
 * The kanji 性 in アルカリ性 is clearly a suffix. It doesn’t need another kanji to form a word. Always try to find a compound with a kanji and a loanword. — T AKASUGI Shinji (talk) 09:25, 26 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Actually, Daijirin puts the sense "-ity" under the noun, and begins the definition with 名詞の下に付いて、….
 * Now suppose that an editor find the "-ity" sense to be a suffix (instead of a noun or an affix). In the current entry layout, the editor must add the following three lines and move the definition to the new place:

Suffix

 * The new entry layout allows the editor to change only one label, which greatly increases efficiency. --Dine2016 (talk) 08:09, 29 May 2019 (UTC)