Help with kanji

curmudgeon said:

She learned kanji in school and knows more than most Japanese, who were taught a shorter list

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Well, I know you meant no offense for Japanese people, but I want to object to it. I can easily identify all those kanji you listed, and it's obvious that most Japanese people can read family or location names such like 陸奥, 磐城 or 会津 correctly. (Incidentally, 陸奥 indeed can read みちのく, as you wrote, but it's also obvious that みちのく is not used for a family name.) If she was stumped by a good deal of it, it can't be said that she knows more than most Japanese. Indeed some names have multiple readings like Osada and Nagata for 長田, but these names are both not uncommon. It's easy to get these two reading.

I've never heard 渠會倍, and I couldn't read it because this name doesn't exist anymore, but I can get the correct reading by googling it. I initially read 久努 as Kudo. In fact, there was Kudo village in Shizuoka prefecture. It has nothing to do with Abe clan, though. Anyway, I can finally get the correct reading Kunu. I believe it's easy for Japanese people to identify each kanji in printed font, and it's not so difficult to get the correct reading just by searching it in internet or printed books in Japanese.

I'm Japanese, by the way.

curmudgeon said:

By 'silent' I meant only that 'yama' is not part of the name as spoken.

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The point is that 嶋 is a single kanji, and not "山 + 鳥". 山 is just a component of 嶋, as Majestic-san pointed out. 山 has nothing to do with the reading of 嶋, as same as 土 for 城 or 木 for 柴. You shouldn't think these are "compound characters" or something, which is no doubt the key of your misunderstanding about the interpretation of kanji, and the cause of your confusion, I think.

Some kanji, which are called 形声文字 "keiseimoji", were indeed originally made by this method, but it's in ancient period. No one can make new characters anymore. Thus, you don't need to pay attention to the difference between sanzui and sanzukuri in 渠 because the upper left component of this kanji must be sanzui, whether or not it looks closer to sanzukuri to your eyes. In the first place, sanzukuri is never used in this position, as I already pointed out.

curmudgeon said:

I have to look up the correct terminology for the distinction in compound characters between parts that tell you what it means and parts that tell you how it sounds.

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Try to search about 意符 and 音符.

Should have specified that I meant the Japanese hereabouts, who have been away from native land for many years or even educated partly abroad, not everyone in Japan, or the folks at the consulate and others--we have a school in Portland that teaches non-Japanese very well, and they might well be as good as the lady in question; so we had no one we knew to whom we could turn for help locally, and thank God for Japan Refer! Also I meant the unusual combinations and those where several readings were possible. She saw various possible readings for 'Kosobe' and had no way of knowing which was the right one; and as we have seen even pretty knowledgeable writers such as Papinot don't always get these right. She got the majority right, certainly, f. ex. knew 久 but not what results when you put it together with 努 to form a name.

As for the kanji, tell me if I have this right, please. The majority of them are made up of several parts that usually, if extracted, form kanji by themselves. They are presumably all there for a reason, but not all for the same reason--they may give some idea of the meaning, or of a class of things to which that which is designated belongs, and some of them are clues to pronunciation. Which parts make up the total character seems quite unpredictable, but even to look something up in a kanji dictionary it is necessary to analyze into constituent parts. I certainly do not think that by pronouncing each part as if were independent you could get anything like the proper sound of the kanji; you would get gibberish. In the case in question I suppose the part that by itself would be yama is rather a clue to the meaning, an island being a hill or mountain that sticks out of the water.

For the pronunciation, whether it is on or kun etc I depend on Wiktionary, which regularly gives a number of possible readings and classifies them. Koop and Inada give only what is relevant to the personal and place names, with no classification. If there is a nanori at all, Wiktionary usually lists several for a given kanji, sometimes some of them quite different from others. That is where I got the nanori you corrected. I certainly accept the correction and will revise accordingly, but I just wanted to say that I was not making that stuff up.

curmudgeon said:

As for the kanji, tell me if I have this right, please. The majority of them are made up of several parts that usually, if extracted, form kanji by themselves. They are presumably all there for a reason, but not all for the same reason--they may give some idea of the meaning, or of a class of things to which that which is designated belongs, and some of them are clues to pronunciation. Which parts make up the total character seems quite unpredictable, but even to look something up in a kanji dictionary it is necessary to analyze into constituent parts. I certainly do not think that by pronouncing each part as if were independent you could get anything like the proper sound of the kanji; you would get gibberish.

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These parts are called radicals by the way. So if you Google something like "kanji radicals" you can get more details about what they are and how they work. But I think everything you said here is correct. I'm not sure how many of the 214 radicals are kanji by themselves. Certainly many are not. In the old days (paper dictionaries, early electronic dictionaries) you had to figure out which radical a given kanji is based on. Nowadays you can identify any of the component parts and be able to look up a kanji.

curmudgeon said:

In the case in question I suppose the part that by itself would be yama is rather a clue to the meaning, an island being a hill or mountain that sticks out of the water.

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In the case of 嶋, both the right and left side together give the meaning. As I mentioned before, the original form of the kanji was originally bird + mountain, or, more accurately, bird on top of mountain (㠀). This represented a bird resting on a rock sticking out of the water (hence: an island).

This is why I pointed out that if you consider the "mountain" to be silent, then you sort of have to consider the "bird" to be silent as well. But I don't want to belabor that point as I think we are clear now. But this extended discussion on 嶋 is why, personally, I think you are getting deep into the weeds when you try to dissect each kanji. If you are diving into the etymology or orthography of the various ways of writing "Abe" and the family branches, its going to be a very, very tough slog if you don't speak Japanese.