In modern Japanese, there are many Sino-Japanese words with two characters, one of which is read by Go-on and the other by Kan-on, such as gengo (gen is Kan-on and go is Go-on). It has been remarked that the blending of Go-on and Kan-on scarcely occurred until the medieval period. To quantitatively confirm this perspective, this study classified Sino-Japanese words with two characters, of which Go-on and Kan-on are explicitly distinct, into three categories, namely, Go-on, Kan-on, and blend reading words. The proportion of blend reading words to the other two words in Iroha Jiruishō (the Japanese dictionary compiled in the 12^th century) is approximately 15%, and in Nippo Jisho (the Japanese–Portuguese dictionary compiled in 1603-04), it rises to approximately 24%. This result demonstrates that the blending of Go-on and Kan-on increased during the medieval period. This study also pointed out that some examples of shifts between Go-on and Kan-on implies that the unification of Sino-Japanese readings, which means either Go-on or Kan-on becomes dominant for each character, influenced the spread of blending.

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This paper explains how the number of occurrences of forms in linguistic research can be handled and evaluated, dividing the cases into those based on sample surveys from a larger population and those based on complete surveys; trials of numerical calculations are included. There are numerous effective tests for evaluating the number of occurrences in a sample survey. In linguistic surveys, the chi-squared test is often used in the analysis of usage surveys and questionnaires. This test is particularly effective when describing relationships between variables; however, it is important to note that generating accurate results when the expected value is extremely small or when the sample size is extremely large is difficult because of the test’s strong sensitivity to the sample size. In contrast, in the evaluation of the number of occurrences in a complete survey, the frequencies with respect to the entire population surveyed are important. For inter-source comparisons of classical words, it is necessary to use relative frequencies based on the frequencies in the entire population, rather than raw frequencies.

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