joadbres
八方凡人
- 19 Sep 2016
- 733
- 277
I'm going to take a stab at this. Hopefully, my comments will help more than confuse...
First of all, 顰める did not become ひそめる. Rather, these are two different ways to write the same thing. In Japanese, words that can be written entirely with kanji, or in part with kanji, can also be written entirely in hiragana. In fact, if you look at books aimed at young children, they are written almost entirely in hiragana, with perhaps a few simple kanji sprinkled in (and perhaps katakana, but we'll leave that for another day). As the target age goes up, more and more words are written using kanji.
In the specific case of ひそめる, this word can be written with either of two different kanji, however both of these kanji are uncommon and difficult for some Japanese people to read, and so this specific word is almost always written entirely in hiragana. When it is written with kanji, though, the single kanji character is substituted for the first two hiragana characters. This can be seen if you click on the earlier link to go to the dictionary page for ひそめる. There, you will see that the main header on that page looks like this:
ひそ・める【×顰める／×嚬める】の意味
The dot on the left shows you how the word is divided when written with kanji. The part before the dot will be replaced with kanji, and the part after is left as is (this part is called okurigana, as mentioned in an earlier post). And, by the way, the tiny X marks to the left of each of the two kanji in the above header line tell you that each of these characters is rare.
In contrast, for a simple word almost always written with kanji, note the following dictionary entry header:
いし【石】の意味
This word can be written in hiragana as いし, or in kanji as 石. Again, the kanji replaces two hiragana characters. There is no dot in this case, so there is no okurigana. And there is no tiny X mark before the kanji, so you know it is NOT an uncommon character.
