掲示板 Forums - ろく vs リウ/リュー

Words in kana can mean many things when it's not put into context or expressed in the relevant kanji. Many different kanji may have the same kana, but may also have different meanings and nuances.

For 六, the onyomi reading is indeed ろく and there's another onyomi reading of リク. The other リウ/リュー might be something else. The kunyomi reading is む（っつ）六つ。

Try giving more context, and we may be able to help more.

Wiktionary says りゅう is the Tō-on reading of the 六 kanji.

Tō-on = "a Sino-Japanese kanji pronunciation layer; imported to Japan beginning in the mid-Heian period and ending in the Edo period."

So, it seems like it's a pretty rare reading.

Thanks to more contributions on the reading of リュー. And more about "a Sino-Japanese kanji pronunciation layer; imported to Japan beginning in the mid-Heian period and ending in the Edo period."
Heian period is AD 794 to 1185, so Mid-Heian may refer to somewhere starting from AD 990.
Edo period is A.D. 1603 and 1867.

That means we're looking at language import period of AD 990 to 1867, that's 9th to 18th century.

I'll add more to the mix:

This period, China was going through Song Dynasty, Jin Dynasty, Yuan dynasty, Ming dynasty, and Qing dynasty. There were many dialects during this period and official overseas trade language I'm not too familiar. However, the descendant language we're using as modern chinese mandarin (Beijing's Official Mandarin) today is indeed リュー, which I think is descended from northern chinese dialect with strong influences from northern region which is the region around mongolia (china has been invaded much in history).

Some dialects tracing back to historical dynasties have same pronunciation patterns but different tonality inflections. リウ/リュー sounds about right. It may be an archaic reading and is dropped today from modern japanese (which has gone through a number of rounds of national language standardization) .

If anything, my observations so far making personal rough guesses is that most onyomi reading is used as "shortened" reading compared to reading full blast kunyomi of all the characters of higher concept words e.g. philosophy 哲学(てつがく rather than さといまな), unless the word's concepts are "primitive" e.g. eat, sleep, work; which originate within japan since ancient times of the language evolution. We also can't discount language import and trends during the period. It might be in fashion to mix some chinese for social credibility/showoff, just like how today Japan's younger generation have their import from english/french/german and shortened messaging language for looking cool or keeping up with the generations (boomers, gen-X, gen-Y, gen-z, millennials, and confused strawberry generations).