At least in Hong Kong, "new" characters for spoken Cantonese are often derived from existing Chinese characters that sound similar, despite those characters hav

At least in Hong Kong, "new" characters for spoken Cantonese are often derived from existing Chinese characters that sound similar, despite those characters having a completely different meaning. Wikipedia has a fascinating entry [1] with many examples of this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Cantonese_character_formation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Cantonese_ch...