I read a funny story [Japanese] in the Japanese news recently, of a young woman who ought a second-hand iPod online, only to discover she had been sold her own previously stolen iPod. But what interested me was the name of the place where the suspected iPod thief was arrested: Nonoichi City. In Japanese, the name of this place is written 野々市市, where the characters are read, in order: no no ichi shi.
This name is quite curious in that it contains the sound no written in two different ways (野 and 々), and at the same time, the character 市 represents two different morphemes (ichi and shi). The second symbol in the Japanese name, 々, is not really a character; more a 'ditto' mark (called a dō no jiten [Japanese]) representing a repetition of the first character, 野. The character 市 is very much a typical kanji in that it can represent one of two morphemes: a Japanese one (ichi) and a Sino-Japanese one (shi). It is just chance, really, that a name ending in 市 ichi should then be followed by the suffix -市 -shi for City. In fact, until late 2011, Nonoichi was not a 市 but a 町 chō, a smaller administrative unit (source: Japanese wikipedia).
What's interesting here, then, is the coexistence of a 々 and a repeated character, and it's this that made me think about the use of 々 in a way I hadn't before. If the rule for 々 is simply that it signals that the previous kanji is repeated, then why not 野々市々? I think there are two reasons.
- The structure of the word is [nonoichi[shi]]; the use of 々 is unnatural across structural boundaries. To give another example, "その時時田さんもいた" ("At that time [時] Tokida [時田] was there too") is fine, but "その時々田さんもいた" is definitely no good.
- A 々 is only usable when the same character is repeated to stand for the same morpheme. In 野々市市, the character 市 is repeated but the first morpheme, ichi, is not.
