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Yes, this happens in English too, but to find examples like this you have to go to Wikipedia, or wrack your brain and see if you remember one. In Japanese, almost every other word is like this. I went to the first link in your comment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence ), selected the Japanese version of the article, and took the first sentence: > 袋小路文（ふくろこうじぶん）とは、文法的には正しいけれども、誤読が生じやすい書き出しで始まる文のことである。 As is usual for Japanese, this sentence contains a mix of Chinese(-origin) ("kanji", e.g. 袋 小 路 文 法 的) as well as Japanese phonetic ("kana", e.g. ふくろこうじぶん) characters. Usually, when in a multi-kanji word, kanji are pronounced with (a time-changed version of) Chinese pronunciation. For example, 文法 is "bun-pou", not "fumi-nori" or something else. However, the first character of the article title (fukurokoubunji), 袋, is "fukuro" here despite being in a four-kanji word. Further, 小 is "kou" here, which is nonstandard enough that its dictionary entry does not even list it as a possible pronunciation! [1] Then 路文 are both in Chinese pronunciation (ji-bun), but this does not necessarily make sense because the word is not split in two down the middle, but instead as 袋-小路-文 (bag-lane-sentence, where bag-lane is English cul-de-sac / blind alley). [2] Now fukurokoubunji is a bit of a specialised word, so it might not be a great example. But in the rest of the sentence, we find 文, which is always pronounced "bun" (sentence) here, even when appearing separately, but could also (though more rarely) have been "fumi" (letter) — nothing but semantical context helps distinguish. Then we have 正しい "tada-shi-i", where 正 could have been "sei" as in 正確 "sei-kaku" (accurate) or "shou" as in 正直 "shou-jiki" (honest), but it isn't just because しい come after. Similarly, 生 in 生じやすい is "shou"(-ji-ya-su-i), which is conjugated from the base form 生じる "shou-ji-ru" and could have been "u" (生まれる "u-ma-re-ru") or "sei" (先生 "sen-sei") or "i" (生きる "i-ki-ru") or more (生 is somewhat infamous for having many readings). And I could go on: 書 could be "syo" (文書 "bun-syo") but is "ka" (書き出して "ka-ki-da-shi-te" conjugated from 書く "ka-ku"). This is a bit like the comments elsewhere here noting that the Chinese word for "sneeze" is a bad example because it happens to have so uncommon characters in it — and then people point to examples like "onomatopoeia" and "diarrhoea" as similar tricky examples in English. I can't comment on Chinese, but existence does not necessarily say much about frequency. [1]: https://jisho.org/search/%E5%B0%8F%20%23kanji — Kun are the Japanese readings (chiisai, ko, o, sa), and On are the Chinese readings (only "shou" in this case) [2]: This analysis of 袋小路文 is not completely etymologically honest. By the etymology ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B0%8F%E8%B7%AF#Etymology_... ), we see that the "kouji" pronunciation of 小路 is really a corruption of ancient "ko-michi", which is a consistent Japanese-Japanese reading of the two characters. However, because "ji" is also an (uncommon) Chinese reading of 路, if you don't know the etymology of the word, the re-analysis is appropriate in the context of how hard it is to read the written language. |
It's not a Chinese reading at all (as you can tell because it's ... wildly out of place with the the actual Chinese-derived readings ろ・る, onyomi are supposed to have semi-regular correspondences with each other and with Chinese Chinese readings). It's really just rendaku of ち, the basic root of fossilized compound みち (with still-salient prefix "honorific" み).
But most importantly, you never really see either 袋 or 小路 and expect them to have any other readings; maybe you'd expect しょうろ if you don't know the latter, but unless you're already literate in a Chinese or are blindly memorizing kanji tables, the other reading of 袋 (たい) probably isn't even salient, because it's one of those kanji that almost always takes its kunyomi even in compounds.
Side note, the line about u-onbin kind of buries the implication that this is a loanword from western Japanese, which is the culprit of several quasi-systematic but unevenly distributed divergences from regular sound changes.