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Why 今日 is pronunciated きょう?

Yuta73

先輩
24 Jun 2010
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I know it can be pronounced as こんにち, and that's OK, because they are listed as possible readings for these kanji.

Is this a special case or there's some obscure rules about kanji readings I don't know?. If indeed is a special case, how often happens that a word is pronounced completely different from the kanji forming them?
 
The converse, where the kanji characters are used for their meaning without regard to their original reading and are assigned a new reading, is also a form of ateji. An example is 煙草 (tabako) for "tobacco", where the individual kanji have no phonetic relationship to the compound. Compounds that are established in the language are known as 熟字訓 (jukujikun), while improvised uses are just ateji (for example, 宿敵 shukuteki 'mortal enemy' to be read as the English-derived word raibaru 'rival').
Ateji - Wikipedia

examples of 熟字訓
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%86%...8%93#.E4.BE.8B
 
haha, as a native Chinese when I first started learning Japanese, I was thinking "man, Japanese people made chinese characters into a so much more complicated and excessively and unnecessary difficult."
 
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