# Japanese homophones: 大和言葉 and 漢語



## Nino83

Hello everyone.

I read here that there are two types of homophones (different words with the same pronunciation) in Japanese and that there's some difference between these two types.

Let's begin with 漢語.
The first example (made in that page) is こうき (kōki), that has something like 8 different meanings.
This is due to the fact that Old and Middle Japanese lacked some phonological oppositions that were present in Middle Chinese (/k/ vs. /h/, tones, /n/ vs. /ŋ/) or that some sounds merged (/ŋ/ > /ũ/ > /u/; /au/, /ou/ > /ō/).
For example, the first syllable of こうき.
Mandarin, Cantonese, Middle Chinese, Japanese:
好 hào hou3 xɑu kō (好機):
廣 guǎng gwong2 kwɑŋ2 kō (広軌)
光 guāng gwong1 kwɑŋ kō
甲 jiǎ gaap3 kap̚ kō
So, for example 好 and 廣 have a different consonant ( vs. [k], JP [k]), 廣 and 光 a different tone (no tone in JP), 好, 廣, 光 and 甲 a different ending ([au], [aŋ], [oŋ] and [ap] in Cantonese), while in Japanese all these endings are equal (/au/ > /ō/ = /aŋ/ > /aũ/ > /au/ > /ō/ = /oŋ/ > /oũ/ > /ou/ > ō = /ap/ > /apu/ > /aɸu/ > /au/ > /ō/).
Anyway it is said that these words of Chinese origin (和製漢語 included) don't pose any problem in writing, seeing that they are different words with a very different meaning.

The other category is that of 大和言葉.
The author says that: "On the other hand, the abundance of _kun_ (native Japanese) homophones is a source of confusion even to professional writers and editors. Not only can each kanji have many _kun_ readings, but many _kun_ words can be written in a bewildering variety of ways. [...] Unlike _on_ homophones, the majority of _kun_ homophones are often close or even identical in meaning and thus easily confused, as shown in the table below"
_noboru_: 上る go up (steps, a hill), 登る climb, scale, 昇る ascend, rise.

Now, what I'd like to ask you is if you think that these native Japanese words are homophones, i.e different words with the same pronunciations, or polysemic words, i.e words with more than one (often similar) meaning, depending on the context.

For example, the English verb _get_ is a polysemic word, i.e it can mean "to arrive" _when did you get here_, "to receive/obtain" _I got a letter from John_, "to buy" _he got a newspaper_, "to bring" _get a drink for John!_, "to make/persuade somebody to do something" _he got his sister to help him with his homeworks_, "to understand" _I got it!_, and so on. The word _get_ is a single word, it's not an homophone. The meanings are similar. You didn't have something before and now you have it.
Some example of homophones, i.e different words that, due to the phonetic evolution, share, now, the same pronunciation.
_Meet_ and _meat_: Middle English [meːtʰ] vs. [mɛːtʰ], Early Modern English [miːtʰ] vs. [meːtʰ], Modern English [miːtʰ].

Two homophones are clearly distinguished in speech, because their meanings are very different, while a polysemic word is often seen as a single words whose meaning can change a little depending on the context.
Seeing that Japanese have often some problems with yamato kotoba "homophones", do you think they are the same word with more meanings? Is it as if the English wrote the verb _get_ with different spellings depending on the context? Before learning the different kanjis, did you think that the verb _noboru_ is the same word? Are the differences in writing a bit artificial?
What do you think?

Thank you


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## Flaminius

Autochthonous words such as _noboru_ are not polysemic and definitely not homophonous.  _Noboru_ appear to be polysemic only because it has a few conventional script representations.


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## Nino83

Thank you, Flaminius.
So, are you saying that these differences are present only in writing and that, in general, the meaning of these native Japanese words is only one (in the case of _noboru_, simply "to go up")?


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## Flaminius

Yes.  It is often said that the convention for different script representation is in keeping with the usage domains in older Chinese language but not all of them are correct Chinese.  Case in point; look how many "readings" a Chinese character can possibly have in people's names.


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## tagoot

I am not a professional researcher of Japanese language, but here’s my two cents.



Nino83 said:


> Now, what I'd like to ask you is if you think that these native Japanese words are homophones, i.e different words with the same pronunciations, or polysemic words, i.e words with more than one (often similar) meaning, depending on the context.



My take on this is the latter: _noboru_:のぼる is one and the same Yamato-Kotoba although it is written in different ways(i.e. 上る go up (steps, a hill), 登る climb, scale, 昇る ascend, rise). Japanese is a highly abstract language. Anything that goes upward can be described as のぼる. There are some situations, however, where you want specify how it goes upward. In such cases, it is convenient to borrow Chinese characters which have delicate differentiations. That is why SUZUKI Takao called Japanese TV-type language; you have to look at written sentence to grasp the meaning (but it’s fast).

One of the other examples is utsusuうつす. We write it as 移すto move, 写すto photograph, 映すto reflect. They are the same in the meaning of moving something to the other place. We have many other examples.



Nino83 said:


> do you think they are the same word with more meanings? Is it as if the English wrote the verb _get_ with different spellings depending on the context?


Yes, I think so.



Nino83 said:


> Before learning the different kanjis, did you think that the verb_noboru_ is the same word? Are the differences in writing a bit artificial?


I had never thought it that way. On reflection, I would say I had thought that the verb noboru is one and the same word. Before learning different kanjis, how could we differentiate many usage of “noboru”?
However, I do not think it artificial, since it helps differentiate colorful nuances of a Yamato-kotoba.


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## Nino83

Thank you very much, Flaminius and tagoot.  


tagoot said:


> Japanese is a highly abstract language. Anything that goes upward can be described as のぼる. There are some situations, however, where you want specify how it goes upward.


It happens in other languages too. For example, in Italian one can use the same verb for _salire su una montagna_ (to go up, on a hill, 上る) and _salire in cielo_ (ascend, in the sky, 昇る). There are synonims, like _ascendere_ (for the second meaning). 
Another example is _scalare_. _Scalare una montagna_ (climb a mountain), _scalare la marcia_ (to change down the gear of your car), _scalare una società_ (to take over a company). Also in English you can use _ascend_ instead of _climb_, in_ ascend a mountain_.  
The difference is that in Japanese you use different Chinese characters in order to give some nuance in writing. Interesting.  
So, in other words, kanjis are not necessary in order to disambiguate the meaning of yamato kotoba words (and, as a consequence, many people sometimes prefer to use _kana_ in writing, as it is said in that page) but are important in order to clarify the meaning of kango words (that, I read, are 60% of Japanese vocabulary and 18% of the words commonly used in speech).


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## karlalou

There's only one verb のぼる. This is simple and easy. I think no Japanese have any trouble with it.

It's usually, which the right kanji is, giving us trouble to write something right.
上る, 登る, or 昇る is an easier example, most of grown-ups should not have any trouble with them, but, yes, there's many difficult cases.


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## tagoot

The conclusion in the article is as follows:
1.  Since many _kun_ homophones are nearly synonymous or even identical in meaning, they are easily confused. As a result, there is no way to predict which particular homophone will appear in a text.
2.  The distinction between some homophones is so subtle that many authors sidestep the irksome task of selecting the appropriate kanji and resort to hiragana.
3.  Since Japanese has only a small stock of phonemes, the number of homophones is very large.

No.3 is definitely true.

As for No.1, I admit that there are many examples of such homophones that Japanese learners might have trouble in choosing the right kanji. To be honest, however, native speakers don’t find it too troublesome with a limited number of exception. Primary school pupils are trained to find the right kanji in a vast variety of phonemes, and they learn to disambiguate as they progress in school.

As for No.2, I admit that there are some cases which are difficult even for educated adults. It is true that I sometimes resort to hiragana: we have a saying that goes “迷ったら漢字を使え。(When you are not sure, use hiragana.)”. Please note, however, our communication will not be harmed by this, since the core image of a specific Yamato-kotoba is shared by a majority of people.



Nino83 said:


> So, in other words, kanjis are not necessary in order to disambiguate the meaning of yamato kotoba words (and, as a consequence, many people sometimes prefer to use_kana_ in writing, as it is said in that page)



I am afraid I cannot agree on this. We do use variety of kanjis for not only kango but also yamato-kotoba for the purpose of disambiguation in daily life (with a limited number of exceptions, as I told you before). If I use too many hiragana Yamato-kotobas in writing, I might be regarded as uneducated.

SUZUKI Takao said something like this; Japanese has evolved into a sophisticated language by acquiring Chinese character as its skeleton. We cannot take off our skeleton.


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## Nino83

Thank you, tagoot! 


tagoot said:


> 3. Since Japanese has only a small stock of phonemes, the number of homophones is very large.
> No.3 is definitely true.


I think this matter is often overvalued. There are many languages with a simple syllable structure and not so many consonants. For example, Indonesian. In native words non-final syllables can be closed only by "n" or "r". Japanese has "n" and "っ" in syllable coda. It's true that Indonesian can have closed final syllables with any consonant. In Japanese it's not so different, you add a final vowel and the word is longer.
For example, the English word _ticket_ is _ti-két_ in Indonesian (two syllables) while it is _chi-ke-t-to_ チケット in Japanese (three syllables, four moras, a final vowel). In Japanese it's simply longer.
The same can be said about Cantonese and Mandarin. Cantonese retained final [p, t, k] and the difference between final [m] and [n], and the majority of its words are monosyllabic while about two-thirds of Mandarin words are polysyllabic. When a language has less sound combinations (i.e less consonant clusters or diphthongs), it has, often, longer words, seeing that languages tend to avoid homophones in their native vocabulary.
I read that, in general, yamato-kotoba words are longer than kango. Do you have this impression?
(For example, _tegami_ has three syllables while _hon_ has one, and _kun_ readings are, often, polysyllabic, while _on_ readings are monosyllabic).


tagoot said:


> We do use variety of kanjis for not only kango but also yamato-kotoba for the purpose of disambiguation in daily life


As far as you know, in your experience kanjis are more often necessary to disambiguate kango or yamato-kotoba?
My humble impression, as an unaware non-native speaker, is that it seems to be more likely to happen with kango or wasei-kango, seeing that every kanji has more _kun_ readings (i.e more Japanese syllables share the same kanji), many Middle Chinese sounds merged in Japanese and (to be confirmed) yamato-kotoba are longer (they have more syllables).


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## karlalou

Nino83 said:


> I read that, in general, yamato-kotoba words are longer than kango. Do you have this impression?
> (For example, _tegami_ has three syllables while _hon_ has one, and _kun_ readings are, often, polysyllabic, while _on_ readings are monosyllabic).


Right, but my impression is that often times _on _readings of each separate kanji letter doesn't mean anything to us. For example, 'white' is 白（しろ） in Japanese, and not ハク. When 白 is read in _on_, ハク, it's always combined with another letter such as 紅白（コウハク red and white） or 白墨（ハクボク chalk or calcite）.

I think 本（ホン） is a rare case. I thought it's _kun_, but, right, dictionary says it's _on_.

Just looking at one letter 好, we don't know what to do with it. That's true that each kanji letter has a meaning, but we don't know how should we read it. It's just a letter and not a word yet. It has to be with another letter such as 好き（すき） or 好む（このむ） or 好物（コウブツ favorite food） or etc.


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## tagoot

*Nino83*
I admire your profound literacy in world languages.



Nino83 said:


> I read that, in general, yamato-kotoba words are longer than kango. Do you have this impression?


Yes.



Nino83 said:


> As far as you know, in your experience kanjis are more often necessary to disambiguate kango or yamato-kotoba?


Yes.

SUZUKI Takao, a famous sociolinguist, explained the characteristic of Japanese language like this.
Takao Suzuki (sociolinguist) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There is a English word, hydrocephalus, or水頭症 in Japanese.

As you know, it is a usually congenital condition in which an abnormal accumulation of fluid in the cerebral ventricles causes enlargement of the skull and compression of the brain, destroying much of the neural tissue.
hydrocephalus

In case of “hydrocephalus”, hydro is a Greek meaning water, and cephalus is another loan word meaning brain, but they have nothing to do with everyday vocabulary. You have to remember every high-level word one by one (of course you can make it easier by learning the etymology).

In Japanese, it is called水頭症(sui-tou-shou). 水(sui) is mizu(water), 頭(tou) is atama(head), and 症(shou) is yamai(disease). 水頭症 is of high-level vocabulary and when you hear the word by ear for the first time, it may be difficult to understand. When you read the word, however, you can understand, at least, that is a disease concerning head filled with water since in Japanese you can understand the notion of a kanji through kun (everyday words). This is why he called Japanese a TV-type language: it is efficient in that just seeing high-level words is enough for you to grasp, at least, the general notion of them.

What if we do not have kanji? We may call it mizu-atama-yamai (7 syllables). It is too long. Sui-tou-shou (3 syllables) is short, and it conveys the feeling that this is a medical term. In short, the existence of on and kun are useful in conveying the notion of, and creating high-level jargon while keeping the brevity of the words.

I hope this explanation will help you understand the role of kanji and of on-kun.


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## tagoot

Nino83 said:


> As far as you know, in your experience kanjis are more often necessary to disambiguate kango or yamato-kotoba?


I should have said that kanjis are more often necessary to disambiguate kango than yamato-kotoba.


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## Nino83

Thank you very much for your answer, tagoot.
So, if I had to resume I'd say:
a) there are many more homophones between kango than yamato-kotoba (for example homophones are 22 for kōshin, 28 for kōshi, 25 for seika, 35 for kōkō and so on). I often hear people say "Japanese has a lot of homophones, often 20 different words have the same pronunciation", without making any difference between native and Sino-Japanese words. It is almost impossible for a language to have normally 10-20 homophones (for every word) in its native vocabulary, mutual understanding would be impossible in speech.
b) Sino-Japanese words often are synonyms of native words (not always, but very often). The former are 60% of vocabulary but are used more in scientific writing and in formal situations while in speech their use drops to 20%, often replaced by native words (as far as I read), so in speech there are not so many homophones (i.e fewer than 10-20 homophones per word)
c) the Japanese forms new words using kanji, so a _train_ become an _electricity vehicle_, i.e an _inazuma kuruma_, then they associate the kanjis with those meanings, 電車 and use the _on_ pronunciation, _densha_.


tagoot said:


> In short, the existence of on and kun are useful in conveying the notion of, and creating high-level jargon while keeping the brevity of the words.



This means that if the Japanese were to abolish kanji this would create a big change in the language and, in order to reduce the number of homophones, the number of yamato-kotoba should be increased also in scientific, academic and formal written language because, for example, _kōkō_ could mean high school, industrial education high school, oral cavity, pithead; minehead, entrance to a coal mine, sailing, filial piety, incurable disease, sexual intercourse, so it would be better to call it _takai gakkō_ or _kōtō gakkō_, in order to avoid some misunderstanding (for example, _yesterday I've watched a film about high school/sexual intercourse_).
Furthermore, it would be more difficult to read old writings and it would mean to renounce to a part of Japanese history, culture and to the linguistic bond with China.
Another thing is that kanjis make reading more quick and you can guess the maning of new words without knowing it, by reading the single kanjis.
Here a funny example I've found in internet:
Niwa no niwa ni wa niwa niwatori wa niwakani wani o tabeta
にわの にわには にわ にわとりは にわかに わにを たべた
丹羽の庭には二羽鶏は俄にワニを食べた
In Niwa's garden two chicks ate suddenly a crocodile.

Then, in order to understand why other non-Sinitic languages abolished _hanzi_ I made a quick comparison with these ten characters: 口, 工, 孔, 甲, 光, 江, 校, 項, 稿, 鋼. They have 10 different pronunciations in Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese and there are only two homophones (工 = 孔, gong, 江 = 鋼, gang) in Korean, while in Japanese all these 10 characters have the same _on_ pronunciation.

I want to clarify that this is not the same, old, repetitive (and boring) discussion about kanji, how they are difficult for foreigners and so on.
I'm interested in understanding how it works.

The idea I got of it is the following.
It's not true that Japanese language is _a priori_ full of homophones at the point that its speakers, in order to understand each other in speech, have to draw kanjis in the air.
There is no something like 20 words with the same pronunciation in spoken Japanese, and the number of homophones is not really high in yamato-kotoba.
It's true that in kango e wasei-kango there is a high number of homophones.
This is due to the fact that the Japanese borrowed many Chinese words and create new words using kanji combinations and _on_ readings.
So, Japanese language and kanjis have a very strict and efficient relation.
Abolishing kanji would mean that the use of yamato-kotoba words (longer, with more syllables and less homophones) would be increased (also in formal writings) and, at the same time, the cultural tie with China would be reduced.

If you think that something I wrote is not right or if you don't agree on something, feel free to write it.
I'm interested to know you point of view.


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## tagoot

Nino83 said:


> So, if I had to resume I'd say:
> It is almost impossible for a language to have normally 10-20 homophones (for every word) in its native vocabulary, mutual understanding would be impossible in speech.



My take on this is that we do not feel inconvenience about the existence of many homophones. Words are used in context. Let’s take an example of a kango “kōkō”. If you say “Pay kōkō to your parents.”, it must inevitably mean “孝行”, or filial piety. When you say “My son entered into a kōkō.”, it is “高校” i.e. high-school. We do not have to draw kanjis in the air.

Exception arises in the following situations (there may be some others):
1) When you tell someone the name of a proper noun on the phone,

_If I want to mention female name 奈美（なみ）, I say 奈 in 神奈川prefecture and 美しい。
Mr. Saito is written in 20 plus different ways, and it is extremely difficult to designate specific one only on the phone._

2) or When two or more homophones exist in a certain domain of topics.

_There are two types of “Shiritsu” schools in Japan; one is 市立, or city-run, and the other is 私立, or private. When we want to specify, we resort to kun-reading. Although the authentic way of reading市立高校 is shiritsu-kōkō, we call it ichiritsu-kōkō for convenience’s sake, since the kun for 市 is ichi. 私立高校 is likewise pronounced as watakushiritsu-kōkō, since the kun for 私 is watakushi._



Nino83 said:


> b) Sino-Japanese words often are synonyms of native words (not always, but very often). The former are 60% of vocabulary but are used more in scientific writing and in formal situations while in speech their use drops to 20%, often replaced by native words (as far as I read), so in speech there are not so many homophones (i.e fewer than 10-20 homophones per word)



Interestingly, almost all the lyrics of Japanese songs are written only with yamato-kotoba. We rarely find kango in Japanese song lyric. That is also the case in waka and haiku. These things have to appeal directly to human mind, and only yamato-kotoba has that impact, I think.



Nino83 said:


> So, Japanese language and kanjis have a very strict and efficient relation.



I agree with you.



Nino83 said:


> Abolishing kanji would mean that the use of yamato-kotoba words (longer, with more syllables and less homophones) would be increased (also in formal writings) and, at the same time, the cultural tie with China would be reduced.



We will never abolish kanji. 60% of vocabulary is kango(I didn’t know that!). Although many of them are remote from every-day life, we can easily deduce their meaning and use them correctly, since the kanjis in them are familiar to us through kun-reading.

Korea used to have a long tradition of using kango, but they never adopted kun system. Kango, therefore, remained to be a separate entity from their indigenous words. After they abolished kanji, many people have trouble in grasping the correct meaning of kango.
文芸評論家・加藤弘一の書評ブログ : 『漢字廃止で韓国に何が起きたか』 呉善花 (PHP新書)


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## Nino83

tagoot said:


> SUZUKI Takao called Japanese TV-type language


I read  this interview where prof. Suzuki explained it very well. 


> In all of the languages of the world, Japanese is the only one with numerous, sometimes as many as 80 different meanings for the exact same sound.





tagoot said:


> Interestingly, almost all the lyrics of Japanese songs are written only with yamato-kotoba.


Interesting. I read that "non 〜する" verbs and "〜い" adjectives are all yamato-kotoba. 


tagoot said:


> After they abolished kanji, many people have trouble in grasping the correct meaning of kango.


In the presentation of this book it is said:


> 韓国語では一般的な語彙の70%が漢語由来で、専門的な文書では90%以上になるということだが、ハングル表記では同音異義語を区別できない。


Wow, I didn't know that.  


> 同音異義語を避けるには漢語由来の概念語に相当する造語を増やしていくことが考えられ、一部でその試みもあったが、ほとんど普及していないという。


This is what I was saying. If one decides to abolish Chinese characters, there is a need for more native words or "new" words (neologisms). It seems that it didn't happen in South Korea.  
In English it was a bit different. They borrowed many words from a language (French, Norman French) who had fewer vowels (and longer words), so this didn't lead to an increased number of homophones. 
For example, in Italian we pronounce _band_ like _bend_ and _the rock band_ is _la rock _[bɛnd], so if the Romance languages had borrowed a great part of their vocabulary from English, they would have more homophones.  
In East Asia, some languages with fewer sounds borrowed a big part of their vocabulary from Chinese and the number of homophones was increased during this process.  
Thank you very much for all these informations.


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## tagoot

Thank you for sharaing your insight.
Nice to talk to you.


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## Flaminius

For want of a proper terminology, I will use "polyglyphism" for describing a phenomenon exemplified by _noboru_ having a few script representations (if there is an established term, please clue me in; 通仮字 is a term for Chinese).  Polyglyphism is the trace of historical efforts by the Japanese at using Chinese characters in their written communication.  At first, there was a long period wherein writing was done in Chinese and almost entirely relegated to experts of Chinese or Korean descent.  Then gradually Japanese writers committed the Japanese language to writing.  Problems arose as to how to match the Chinese characters they knew with the autochthonous vocabulary.  One cannot expect that two languages are always in one-to-one match (even though the former is _prima facie_ a script, it can be regarded as a written language in this discussion).  For the case of the polyglyphism of _noboru_, Japanese writers over time had to create conventions to match Japanese and Chinese synonyms.  Currently, _noboru_ and _agaru_ and their transitive counterparts are written with one or more of Chinese synonyms such as the following; 上, 昇, 騰, 登.

To further illustrate polyglyphism, if the Romans had not have Latin alphabets, they could have developed a writing system in which the core meaning of a word is represented in the Greek equivalent spelt in capital letters and the Latin inflection is marked in lower case.  They would have written ΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΙΣεγι (read _surregi_) for "I rose" and ΑΝΑΒΑΣΙΣερυντ (read _ascenderunt_) for "they went up."  Matching _surgo_ with the usually impossible _anistasthai_ may have rendered a poetic effect.  Then, a Roman could have used ΑΝΑΒΑΣΙΣγιτ (read _surgit_) for "My girlfriend gets up gracefully."  It is a fun hypothetical story but is what happened for Ancient Oriental languages (such as Akkadian, Elamite and Hittite) when they adopted Sumerian cuneiforms to their documents.

Takao Suzuki is a respectable linguist but I cannot wrap my head around his popular works, especially those written in this century.  By Japanese being a "TV-type language" he seems to claim that Chinese characters or character combinations directly procure meaning, bypassing phonological forms.  Yes, 耳鼻咽喉科 is much clearer than the English _otorhinolaryngology_.  The advantage, however, is not very solid as English speakers usually resort to _ENT_, short for _ear-nose-throat_.  Phonetically, _jibiinkōka_ (7 morae) is not as economical as /iː.en.tiː/ (3 syllables).  If 耳鼻咽喉科 can visually signify its meaning, methinks _ENT_ can also do that.  It is just three letters long, has hardly no other meaning, and appears in specific contexts; the visual symbol appears to me to be concise , distinct and contextualised enough for English speakers to directly recognise its meaning.

Homonyms are not a big problem in speech as the oral communication is much richer in context than the written.  To be sure, there are a few famous oral disambiguators such as わたくしりつ for 私立 and いちりつ for 市立.  These are to disambiguate between homonyms for _shiritsu_; the former being private-run and the latter city-run (usually said of compulsory education).  Do we, then, have more such disambiguators in areas where more complex ideas are expressed? such as physics, law, philosophy, or mathematics?  Contrary to the expectation, most academic discussions are carried out without referring to them.  Researchers usually seem not to be aware that homonyms could be obstacles to their conversation.

The advantage of using Chinese characters in Japanese texts, I wonder, is economy of space.  In other words, Chinese characters may be preferred as a means to short-hand a word which otherwise will be spelt out phonologically.  Chinese characters as visual representation of meaning cannot fully explain the difference between 会社 and 社会.  _Jūjun_, a word for "obedient" was 柔馴 when it was loaned from Chinese, but now it is 従順.  This change happened in Japanese because 柔 and 従 are not interchangeable in Chinese.  Variant spellings for Sino-Japanese words are not rare; 障害 and 障碍, 総合 and 綜合, 溶接 and 鎔接 (the first of each group is the most general ones now).  None of the spelling changes entail changes in meaning.

The effect of using Chinese characters is not always direct linkage between the visual sign and the meaning.  Above examples are characters used as tokens of phonological forms.  We also need to look at cases where Chinese characters are used like punctuation marks, or as graphemes.  Word boundaries in Japanese is difficult to define.  Distinguishing a word from the text is difficult.  Even advocates of all-kana or all-Latin writing cannot come up with a natural standard with which to space between words.  Using Chinese characters for the immutable part of a word is a partial substitute for word spacing like ones done for European languages.  It always leaves certain amount of ambiguity as to what part is inflection (grammarians keep revising the definition of inflection of Japanese verbs), but it is more important to recognise a Chinese character after a string of kanas indicates the beginning of a new word.

The same can be said of the Seoul variety of Modern Korean.  Jo (2014)* argues that Chinese characters in South Korean newspapers are graphemes rather than disambiguators of homonyms.  His survey looks at how Chinese characters mark word boundaries for set phrases and ad-hoc terms just used in an article.  Yet, Chinese characters in Korean are few and far between.  Regulators of both Seoul and Pyongyang varieties have shaped the writing standards so they can obviate Chinese characters.  I took a cursory glance at articles by Korea JoonGang Daily.  No articles accessible from the top page contained Chinese characters.  This was not a surprise since the language of mass media is usually first to be regulated.  More solid proof is comments posted for articles by the public because their language is less prone to governmental regulations.  Again, I found no Chinese characters.  I take it as evidence to the modern written Korean being clear without Chinese characters.

Japanese is not going to give up on Chinese characters any time soon.  But looking at an example close by will help understand the history of Japanese and shape the language policy for the future.

*趙廷敏「現代韓国語の漢字表記に関する研究: 新聞記事に見られる漢字表記の派生接辞について」 『言語と文明』 第12巻 (2014年)、69-90ページ。


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## Nino83

Flaminius said:


> More solid proof is comments posted for articles by the public because their language is less prone to governmental regulations. Again, I found no Chinese characters.


Yes. I read in a forum these comments from some natives:


> I learned Japanese only to N3 and I know more hanja than any Korean I know if that helps. Even basic ones seem to be unknown. For example, there's a Korean song called 사랑의 시, I asked my girlfriend if the 시 was "poem" or "time" and she said poem. But then I looked at her phone and it clearly had 時 next to the song title.





> Elementary school do not teach hanja, although lots of parents teach their kids hanja with the private 학습지's, like kumon, jangwon, etc. Hardcore parents make their kids take 한자능력검정시험 test. Middle school and high school has optional 한문(classic chinese) subject, which teach 1800 hanja. 수능 also has a 한문 area, which replaces social subjects in 문과.


Hanja education in South Korea? • /r/Korean 
And most of the time when there is some hanja, they are written into brackets after the word written in hangul.


Flaminius said:


> One cannot expect that two languages are always in one-to-one match





Flaminius said:


> They would have written ΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΙΣεγι (read _surregi_) for "I rose" and ΑΝΑΒΑΣΙΣερυντ (read _ascenderunt_) for "they went up." Matching _surgo_ with the usually impossible _anistasthai_ may have rendered a poetic effect. Then, a Roman could have used ΑΝΑΒΑΣΙΣγιτ (read _surgit_) for "My girlfriend gets up gracefully."


The difference is that the Greek alphabet was phonemic, so the Romans could have used it to write Latin words, while Japanese couldn't, seeing that the Chinese script was logographic.


Flaminius said:


> Do we, then, have more such disambiguators in areas where more complex ideas are expressed? such as physics, law, philosophy, or mathematics? Contrary to the expectation, most academic discussions are carried out without referring to them. Researchers usually seem not to be aware that homonyms could be obstacles to their conversation.
> The advantage of using Chinese characters in Japanese texts, I wonder, is economy of space.


Anyway, people say the most common reason for retaining kanji is that they are necessary in order to avoid homophones, expecially in medical and legal documents, where precision is required.
For example, if there is a legal dispute and the contract is not so clear and unambiguous, there would be some problem of interpretation.


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## Flaminius

Nino83 said:


> Yes. I read in a forum these comments from some natives:
> 
> 
> Hanja education in South Korea? • /r/Korean
> And most of the time when there is some hanja, they are written into brackets after the word written in hangul.


Other comments include such views that "한자능력검정시험 test" (漢字能力検定試験) is meaningless, that younger generations understands 90% of the all-hangul bible and so on.  There are PDF links to two rulings of the Supreme Court of the Korean Republic in this article and both documents use Chinese characters only sparingly.  The juries are still out on this matter.




> The difference is that the Greek alphabet was phonemic, so the Romans could have used it to write Latin words, while Japanese couldn't, seeing that the Chinese script was logographic.


Of course there are realistic examples.  Take the key Hittite phrase that Bedřich (Friedrich) Hrozný used for the decipherment of the script (an account with an image is here).  The phrase is transliterated as:
nu NINDA-an e-ez-za-at-te-ni wa-a-tar-ma e-ku-ut-te-ni

Transcriptions for cuneiforms are more linguistic approximation:
nu NINDA-an ezzatteni watarma ekutteni
gross: You (pl.) will eat bread and drink water.

The NINDA in majuscule is a symbol for bread since Sumerian and the exact phonetic value in Hittite is not known (at least to Hrozný).  The following <an> is a phonetic representation of the case marking.  It is the Sumerian symbol for heaven and god. 

This cuneiform was created from the picture of a star and had a shape like <*>.  Its primary meaning in Sumerian is heaven (_an_) but it also meant god (_digir_) and can be used phonetically for the pronunciation /an/ too.  In a text called Inana F, goddess Gashana (Inana in a ritualistic dialect) is spelt (line 2 with modificiation): *-ga-sha-*-*-na

The stars are the same symbol in the actual tablet (VAT 7025 rev.) and it was used in two meanings here.  The first instance is a determiner for god and foretells that the following is the name of a deity.  It is assumed that determiners are not pronounced in spoken Sumerian.  The last two instances are used as the phonetic symbol for /an/.  In modern Sumerology the string of cuneiforms are transcribed as: dga-ša-an-an-na



> the Chinese script was logographic.


Yes and no.  About 90% of the Chinese characters used today are 形声文字 or phonocategoric (tentative translation).  This is a type of characters that consist of one radical that means the category to which the symbol belongs and another that represents its phonetic value.  For example, 語 is a word about speaking and pronounced like GO.  Contrast it with 悟 or a word with a similar pronunciation and is related to cognitive function.  Phonocategoric formation of characters is very old.  Character 河, the Huang He, appears in many bone oracles.  It represented a river whose pronunciation is like 可.  Using a character for words with a similar pronunciations also happens without adding or changing the radical.


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## Nino83

Flaminius said:


> Its primary meaning in Sumerian is heaven (_an_) but it also meant god (_digir_) and can be used phonetically for the pronunciation /an/ too.


Really interesting.  


Flaminius said:


> This is a type of characters that consist of one radical that means the category to which the symbol belongs and another that represents its phonetic value.


In this case, if I understood, in order to distinguish two homophones in writing a second character (radical), that gives the meaning, is added. Even in this case there is a logographic component.


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## Flaminius

Like the example I cited previously (溶接 and 鎔接), the categorical radical of a phonocategorical character can change with a slightest reason.  I would say that the entire Chinese script is a battleground between phonetic forms and semantic representations and every generation of users in difderent regions add a new reorganisation.


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## Nino83

Flaminius said:


> the entire Chinese script is a battleground between phonetic forms and semantic representations and every generation of users in difderent regions add a new reorganisation.


Ah, yes, thanks for the explanation. Now I learned something new about Chinese characters.


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