First opened Sunday, January 23, 2011
紙
かみ
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
paper
Kami was kanpi: a sporadic change turned the mb sound into m, and Ainu borrowed it as kampi.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 紙
In a sentence
書く紙がない。
There is no paper to write on.
本は紙で出来ている。
A book is made of paper.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “From Old Japanese 紙, cited to manuscript kana glosses in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE, from Proto-Japonic *kanpi (the modern standard Japanese form results from a sporadic change of [ᵐb] to [m]). Cognate with Okinawan 紙 (kabi). Compare also Ainu カㇺピ (kampi, “paper”), from Proto-Ainu *kanpi (which is assumed to have been borrowed from Japonic).”
- Hedged“An alternative hypothesis explains the Old Japanese word as a borrowing from Middle Chinese 簡 (kean^X, “bamboo slip used for writing”), with a shift in pronunciation from kan → */kamu/ → /kami/, with excrescent final -i as in 文 (fumi) from borrowed bun or pun. That would require the forms based on [ᵐb] to result from the sporadic change of [m] to [ᵐb], as in 黍 (/kibi/, “millet”) from Old Japanese 寸三 (/ki₁mi₁/). However, Ryukyuan reflexes appear to maintain a /b/ phone, which is more difficult to explain for a borrowing from Chinese.”
Source: Wiktionary: 紙 (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
Other readings of 紙 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かみ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
し
- “From Middle Chinese 紙 (MC tsyeX).”
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.