A Digression Upon the Japanese Word for Volcano

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In kanji, the system of Chinese characters borrowed by the Japanese for their own use, the word for volcano is written

         火山

which pairs the character for fire, 火 hi with the character for mountain, 山 yama.

A literal-minded Westerner might imagine, then, that the word for volcano was pronounced hiyama. But it is actually kazan. Hi and yama are only the names of the characters; they are not what the characters mean. For volcano, what they mean are ka, the aboriginal Japanese word for fire, and