>Example for "yamato kotoba": hana can be "nose" or "flower", hashi can mean "bridge", "edge" or "chopsticks". As you can imagine, most of the time the intended

>Example for "yamato kotoba": hana can be "nose" or "flower", hashi can mean "bridge", "edge" or "chopsticks". As you can imagine, most of the time the intended meaning will be clear. Those words are actually spoken differently, even though they share the same spelling in romanji (or hiragana). The stress accent is in a different place. This is similar to how in English, the noun "record" and the verb "record" are differently stressed despite their identical spelling. Possibly a phonetic othography that included accent pitch would maintain greater readability once people were used to it. Unfortunately, people in Kansai put the stress on different syllables than the people of the Tokyo metropolitan area.