# (No) problems arising with homopones (?), with special reference to Chinese



## Teach & Learn

*Split from here.*


berndf said:


> The problem seems to be the loss of phonetic distinction; a common problem in many East-Asian languages. Even taking into account different tones for disambiguation, there are still a dozen different meanings per distinguishable syllable (=word in Chinese). Have a look at the meanings of min2 (the "2" mean second tone, i.e. rising pitch like at the end of a question in English: "min?"). It seems evident that these are not differentiations of one primitive meaning but homophones caused by lack of phonetic distinction. Take e.g. the meaning "people" of "min2". A close synonym is "ren2". The normal expression for "people" is "ren2 min2" (something like "men-people") as in the currency name "ren2 min2 bi4" (men-people-money=people's currency). By the way: Did you notice the exorbitant number of meanings of bi4? I once sat in plane with a Chinese colleague and I asked her questions about certain Chinese words. After a while she said, slightly annoyed, it makes no sense asking her questions about individual words. In Chinese individuals words cannot be understood. Only sentences can be understood. Only the context and redundancy of the sentence make words intelligible.



It's true that one Chinese character can carry more than one meanings-- just as the rest of languages in the world do. Without context, I can give you a wild run of guessing what I meant by uttering an English word "right". So, Chinese is not the only language that has tons of homonyms.

By the way, Pinyin (the Latin letters with tones) is an equivalent to IPA. How many words can you find if I just write /tai/? (Tie, Thai, tye...?) The "bi4" example, I assume, you meant as homograph; otherwise, 币 (bi4) itself has only one meaning, that is "coin".

Each Chinese character has a story by itself, some have been through more "revolutions" than the others. The above "ren2 min2" is a relatively "new" (tracing back to 1940's) _phrase_ in the Chinese vocabulary, which bears more of a political flavor in it, ie. "people*'s class*" ("class" as in sociology, not "lecture" or "classroom")_._

_(The bold part is not shown or translated at all, but it's like a hidden code language to the natives.)_

Individual Chinese characters *can *be understood, because each of them has a root meaning. What we do to increase the vocabulary is to add other characters to the "root" word, resulting with new *phrases*. Quite similar to most other languages, isn't it?

As to say your experience with the Chinese co-worker, think it this way: Will you be so excited to be treated like a dictionary and just explain random words in whatever languages on a business trip?


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## berndf

Teach & Learn said:


> I assume, you meant as homograph; otherwise, 币 (bi4) itself has only one meaning, that is "coin".


Homophone. It was about phonetic distinctions. Of course, as soon as you add Chinese characters, things are different. But they are not phonetic. That is the whole point. In most languages, more or less phonetic spelling is by and large sufficient to distinguish most words. In Chinese there is no way this could work.


Teach & Learn said:


> As to say your experience with the Chinese co-worker, think it this way: Will you be so excited to be treated like a dictionary and just explain random words in whatever languages on a business trip?


That wasn't the point. The point was that she had no way of knowing of which meaning I was talking and she explained me that.


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## Teach & Learn

Chinese is not a phonetic language, but the key point here is not about writing a word by listening to its sound. You say it doesn't work in Chinese at all, so in which language you think that people pop up with one word out of context and the audience will get it immediately?

I have seen in different language rooms where people wrote their questions in full sentences, and others may still request for further context. Let alone to just shoot random words and wait for a proper answer.

Eg. - What does "fall" mean?
     - Which "fall" do you mean, to drop, to hang down, to lower in pitch, etc. etc., or the season "autumn", a reduction and so on and on?

Eg. - Was ist "auf" auf Englisch?
     - ...?!

Now I remember to mention the "kan4 jian" example. You can separate them and combine with other characters, then there come new phrases. But when they are together, it's *one phrase*, which has a meaning mainly based on the second character, so the whole phrase's meaning is "to see". However, its meaning may switch to "to look" as what the first character literally means, depending on the stress where you put when speaking; and this is not distinguishable in written form. (There are other ways in that case.)

Back to the original question, I don't think there should be a thing called "redundant" in either native or foreign languages. Every bit of each language can intrigue an interesting story or even a piece of "lost" history, which we probably won't see from documents or anywhere else in modern days, but luckily it's still carried on by their languages. I definitely won't say the articles or dative in German or the 14 (or 15 some may say) cases in Finnish are redundant, personally I find that is actually the fun part of language-learning.


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## berndf

Teach & Learn said:


> Chinese is not a phonetic language, but the key point here is not about writing a word by listening to its sound.


Chinese (=Putonghua, Standard Mandarin for the purpose of this discussion) is a spoken language and therefore a phonetic language. You probably mean that Chinese writing is non-phonetic. My comments where about the phonetics of the language. Therefore I did use only Pinyin and did not discuss the writing system.



Teach & Learn said:


> You say it doesn't work in Chinese at all, so in which language you think that people pop up with one word out of context and the audience will get it immediately?


It is not a question of black and white but of shades of grey. And Chinese is an extreme example of a language which has lost much of its phonetic distinctiveness. Other languages, like my own are closer to the other side. We have relatively little homophones. Other languages, like French which has significantly more homophones what German or English or Italian, are somewhere in the middle.


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## Malti

berndf said:


> The point was that she had no way of knowing of which meaning I was talking and she explained me that.



But that's hardly a problem solely in Chinese. The question "What does 'right/write/rite/-wright' mean?" would be similarly hard to answer without any further context, and is hardly a unique example. Or indeed, "What does 'recht/Recht/rächt' mean?".

I see what you're saying about a spectrum but to say English is almost without homophones seems silly.
(I/eye/aye see/sea/C what/Watt/wot you're/your/yore saying... well, you get the idea with that.)


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## berndf

Malti said:


> But that's hardly a problem solely in Chinese. The question "What does 'right/write/rite/-wright' mean?" would be similarly hard to answer without any further context, and is hardly a unique example. Or indeed, "What does 'recht/Recht/rächt' mean?".


As I said, it is a question of shades of grey, not of black and white.
In English it is *not *difficult to find words which have homophones.
In Chinese it is difficult to find words which have *no *homophones.


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## Malti

berndf said:


> As I said, it is a question of shades of grey, not of black and white.
> In English it is *not *difficult to find words which have homophones.
> In Chinese it is difficult to find words which have *no *homophones.



I would suggest that it is fairly hard to find single syllable words in English with only one possible meaning (I suppose I mean single syllable when restricted to (c)v(c) structure). English decreases its ambiguity by adding extra sounds to words and/or sticking words together, Chinese generally does it by the latter. Both methods create the required phonetic distinction. And even with the more phonetically complex words in English, there are still very few that can be correctly defined when taken in complete isolation.

So I am saying that Chinese and English would be broadly the same shade of grey.


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## berndf

Malti said:


> I suppose I mean single syllable when restricted to (c)v(c) structure


Exactly. And English isn't restricted like that. Onset and coda can be consonant groups, e.g. "ground". And Chinese is restricted even further: The coda is either null or a nasal. See J.F. de TROYES's post.



Malti said:


> And even with the more phonetically complex words in English, there are still very few that can be correctly defined when taken in complete isolation.


Don't confuse words with a single origin but a range of related derived meanings with homophones where words of completely unrelated meaning and etymology have become phonetically indistinguishable, like French _sans_, _cent_, and _sang_. If this becomes the rule rather than the exception (which it does in Chinese and to a lesser extend in French but not in English), it is a completely different dimension of complexity.


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## Malti

berndf said:


> Exactly. And English isn't restricted like that. Onset and coda can be consonant groups, e.g. "ground". And Chinese is restricted even further: The coda is either null or a nasal. See J.F. de TROYES's post.



Right, English isn't restricted like that, but even with greater phonetic distinction, the individual words themselves can be nevertheless very ambiguous. Words still need context to be clear, as they do in Chinese, so maybe it's just the extra sounds in English words that are the redundancy.



berndf said:


> Don't confuse words with a single origin but a range of related derived meanings with homophones where words of completely unrelated meaning and etymology have become phonetically indistinguishable, like French _sans_, _cent_, and _sang_. If this becomes the rule rather than the exception (which it does in Chinese and to a lesser extend in French but not in English), it is a completely different dimension of complexity.



I don't think I was confusing anything. And anyway, "right" as in opposite of left is hardly any more obviously connected to "right" as in a legitimately held power than  "bat" as in the animal is to "bat" as in cricket, even though the former are from the same root and the latter from different roots. Either word in isolation is going to be unclear, regardless of derivation.


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## Hulalessar

berndf said:


> Don't confuse words with a single origin but a range of related derived meanings with homophones where words of completely unrelated meaning and etymology have become phonetically indistinguishable, like French _sans_, _cent_, and _sang_. If this becomes the rule rather than the exception (which it does in Chinese and to a lesser extend in French but not in English), it is a completely different dimension of complexity.






berndf said:


> Did you notice the exorbitant number of meanings of bi4? I once sat in plane with a Chinese colleague and I asked her questions about certain Chinese words. After a while she said, slightly annoyed, it makes no sense asking her questions about individual words. In Chinese individuals words cannot be understood. Only sentences can be understood. Only the context and redundancy of the sentence make words intelligible.



I did a bit of Googling to see if I could find the English words with the most meanings. This is the result: 

SET - 464 definitions 
RUN - 396 
GO - 368 
TAKE - 343 
STAND - 334 
GET - 289 
TURN - 288 
PUT - 268 
FALL - 264 
STRIKE - 250 

All according to the OED. 

I was taken back by the number of possible meanings of these words, but what was more surprising was some of the words that featured, and that the list is headed by "set", which I would never have guessed. Of course some of the meanings may be pretty obscure, but I had a look in my Collins English Dictionary and it gives 60 definitions of "set" which is more than enough to be getting on with.

When we come to think about all the possible meanings of the above words I do not think it is relevant whether any particular form has one or more etymologies. Etymologies are not self-evident in speech. What is important is that each word has so many different meanings, even if many of the meanings have some degree of connectedness.

Since I know no Chinese, I am not in a position to talk about it, but I sort of get the feeling that when it comes to monosyllables having multiple meanings English is up there with Chinese.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> SET - 464 definitions
> RUN - 396
> GO - 368
> TAKE - 343
> STAND - 334
> GET - 289
> TURN - 288
> PUT - 268
> FALL - 264
> STRIKE - 250


And now image a phonological process where *on top of this all *the following words became phonetically indistinguishable:
SET
SECT
SAD
SEX
... and a few more.

and this happening to not just to these words but to all monosyllabic words which start with the same initial consonant and a reduced set of distinguished vowels. And only 2 or 3 nasal codas survive. 
You will need some extra redundancy to cope with that in spoken language. You probably know this in a milder form from French.



Hulalessar said:


> When we come to think about all the possible meanings of the above words I do not think it is relevant whether any particular form has one or more etymologies.


It does matter to my argument. In my post argued that the additional redundancy requirements of spoken Chinese were caused by homo*phones* rather than homo*nymes*. Sokol later changed his wording in this post just above mine. Therefore the point of my post might have become less clear.


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## Mahaodeh

Hulalessar said:


> SET - 464 definitions
> RUN - 396
> GO - 368
> TAKE - 343
> STAND - 334
> GET - 289
> TURN - 288
> PUT - 268
> FALL - 264
> STRIKE - 250
> 
> All according to the OED.


 
I'm not trying to discredit anything (or anyone) but I believe that dictionaries tend to overdo it. As an example, they tend to give two different meanings to words in expressions like: _set up_ and _set out_; they consider these as two distinct meanings when in reality when you think about it, the distinct meaning comes from the following word, not from the set itself which tends to maintain a similar, if not identical, meaning.
 
I'm not quite sure whether the reason for that is to explain _every possible situation_ (which seems ridicules to me) or it's just to add word count in the dictionary.
 
I’m not saying that set has only one possible definition, but 464 seem farfetched, if it were true, people would have invented an additional 20 or 30 new words (at least) to cover some of the meanings by now.


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## Maurice92

jmartins said:


> I suppose that the most likely candidates for "languages without redundancy" are isolating languages like Chinese. But I suspect that there's still some amount of redundancy even in those languages. The opinion of someone savvy about them would be helpful.


 
Most of the languages of the Indo-European family which have full conjugation of verbs are redundant ; I take an exemple in French because English is not a good exemple as it is far from the grammar of the other languages of this family.

Take this French sentence : "les animaux mangeront demain" ( = the animals will eat to-morrow).
The word "mangeront" contains : the stemm ("mange") and a marker ("eront") which combine several markers : marker of time (= futur) + marker of person (3rd person) + marker of number (plural). This marker is redundant with "animaux" (which includes 3rd person + plural) and with "to-morrow" (which implies time marker.)
If a person, knowing only a few of the french language, only the infinitive of verbs not the conjugation ,  says : "animaux manger demain", he is perfectly understood.

In East Asian languages (Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, and I suppose Chinese that I know very few), as the languages are isolating, the markers are separate words.
Thus, if the sentence already contains an adverb as "demain", it is allowed, and often done, to omit the word which is a time marker, because it is a separate word; it may also true for the other markers (though I are not so quite sure) . If the markers are omitted, the sentence don't have any redundancy.

The redundancy is generally an advantage and not an inconvenient for the sake of a better understanding; even in isolating languages, the redundancy is suppressed only if there is no risk of confusion.


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## Teach & Learn

berndf said:


> Chinese (=Putonghua, Standard Mandarin for the purpose of this discussion) is a spoken language and therefore a phonetic language. You probably mean that Chinese writing is non-phonetic. My comments where about the phonetics of the language. Therefore I did use only Pinyin and did not discuss the writing system.



Is it all about spoken forms now?! If that's the case, with so many homophones in Chinese, people must be confused all the time when talking, right? Actually, it is the opposite. When people speak Chinese, even including Chinese language learners, they have no problems understanding each other if there is no unfamiliar words involved of course, so what does this tell?

Homophones are hardly an issue in either spoken or written Chinese. As we all know, people communicate by giving contexts. Individual words that have no connections with each other won't make any sense in whichever language. That's why we go to dictionaries instead if a clear and accurate explanation is desired.



berndf said:


> It is not a question of black and white but of shades of grey. And Chinese is an extreme example of a language which has lost much of its phonetic distinctiveness. Other languages, like my own are closer to the other side. We have relatively little homophones. Other languages, like French which has significantly more homophones what German or English or Italian, are somewhere in the middle.



Again, this "shade spectrum" has almost zero influence in communications, at least for Chinese (language) to my knowledge.


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## berndf

Teach & Learn said:


> Is it all about spoken forms now?!


It has always been.
 



Teach & Learn said:


> If that's the case, with so many homophones in Chinese, people must be confused all the time when talking, right?


Not at all. Chinese has obviously managed to device methods to disambiguate homophones through context and redundancy features in the language.
 
Languages with fewer homophones need less context and less redundancy to be unambiguous. In some languages there are complete sentences (not just exclamations or "Yes", "no"), e.g. in Ancient Hebrew "raitich" = "I saw you[-feminin]", consisting of a single word which are phonetically and semantically completely unambiguous.
 
This has nothing to do with one language being superior to another. Every language creates methods to make it practical to communicate in it. Redundancy is one of them. And that is what this thread is about.


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## Ghabi

The so called Chinese "homophones" are just an illusion caused by dictionaries, which are still mostly collated by morphemes, not by words. For example, there are 20 or so "homophones" in Cantonese for the syllable si1:

師思颸司斯撕廝澌絲鷥詩私俬尸屍施獅螄鰤蓍

but among which only 4 are free morphemes (撕/絲/詩/屍), all else being bound morphemes existing only in compound words or frozen/archaic expressions.

Among these 4, one is a verb (撕 "to tear"), the other 3 are nouns, one is used mostly as a material noun without a measure word (絲 "silk"), while the other two employ different measure words (一首詩 "a poem"/一條屍 "a corpse"). You have to create a highly artificial, unlikely context in order to have them confounded.


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## Dymn

Quite often, when looking for the Chinese word for something, I find both the monosyllabic word next to one or more bisyllabic words which include the "main root" as one of their syllables. For example 游 and 游泳 "to swim". I guess the bisyllabic forms are used when context doesn't help.


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## Lugubert

Dymn said:


> Quite often, when looking for the Chinese word for something, I find both the monosyllabic word next to one or more bisyllabic words which include the "main root" as one of their syllables. For example 游 and 游泳 "to swim". I guess the bisyllabic forms are used when context doesn't help.


What about reversing the argumentation? Most Chinese words today consist of two syllables/characters. In some cases, one is sufficient, traditionally or just by current usage.


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