6 ms·

Homonyms exist in every language. The advantages do not outweigh the drawbacks.

zavi 8y ago
There's order of magnitude more homonyms in Mandarin than English to the point where having a pictograms system starts making sense. That's why 80 percent of characters are multipart with one of the radicals carrying the pronunciation.
knolax 8y ago
Homonyms don't exist in every language to the extant that you can write an entire essay with them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...
- tivert 8y ago
  > Homonyms don't exist in every language to the extant that you can write an entire essay with them. Homonyms like that don't exist in any living language. Spoken Classical Chinese is a dead language, like Latin. You only get that effect when you use modern Mandarin pronunciations, they wouldn't have been homonyms if you didn't use anachronous pronunciations. It's sort of like writing a poem that means one thing in Latin and an entirely different thing in modern Italian.
  - knolax 8y ago
    Yet Classical Chinese is still a large part of Chinese literary canon, partially because the writing system allows for written Classical Chinese to comprehended by modern readers. There are no examples to "Lion-Eating Poet" in Italian and English precisely because phonetic writing systems cause most writing to be incomprehensible as pronounciations change. Your example is also egregious also because the entire point of "Lion-Eating Poet" isn't that "it means different things in classical and modern Chinese" but that semantical meaning can still be transmitted by the writing system completely independent of pronounciation.
    - tivert 8y ago
      > Yet Classical Chinese is still a large part of Chinese literary canon, partially because the writing system allows for written Classical Chinese to comprehended by modern readers. But only essentially though translation. It's different enough that a typical Chinese reader can't jump into those works with ease. Latin works are still part of the Western literary canon, and for many centuries Europeans went though the trouble of learning Latin to read them. You can still find fossilized Latin phrases in modern languages like English, et cetera. That doesn't mean Latin is a truly living language. > There are no examples to "Lion-Eating Poet" in Italian and English precisely because phonetic writing systems cause most writing to be incomprehensible as pronounciations change. > Your example is also egregious also because the entire point of "Lion-Eating Poet" isn't that "it means different things in classical and modern Chinese" but that semantical meaning can still be transmitted by the writing system completely independent of pronounciation. There can be no exact analogy because phonetic writing systems are more conserving of pronunciation while systems like Chinese are more conserving of semantics. That's why I said it's "it's sort of like." My point was the poem is more of a stunt than a real statement about a real language.
      - knolax 8y ago
        >But only essentially though translation. Classical works are not translated into Modern Chinese. I think that's the source of our disagreement. When the writing system is focused on semantics, then the threshold where something is considered translation is different than for a phonetic writing system. >Latin works are still part of the Western literary canon. Yes, but most modern westerners can not read Latin on it's own, because of the writing system. >My point was the poem is more of a stunt than a real statement about a real language. What is a "real language" here? The poem is comprehensible to modern Chinese, although the grammar follows Classical Conventions. What makes it not a "real language"?
        tivert 8y ago
        > What is a "real language" here? The poem is comprehensible to modern Chinese, although the grammar follows Classical Conventions. What makes it not a "real language"? I should have been more specific: I meant a real living language. The poem is a stunt that demonstrates how far modern Mandarin pronunciation has diverged from Classical Chinese (which is dead as a spoken language), but it doesn't make much of a statement about the practicality of replacing hanzi with a phonetic system for writing modern living Mandarin.
- sanqui 8y ago
  Homonyms are words that are pronounced the same way. These words use different tones.
  - simplify 8y ago
    There are four tones. The poem has 33 unique words.
  - FabHK 8y ago
    Good point. Beyond that, FWIW, homophones are words that are pronounced the same way. Homonyms are pronounced and spelt the same way. I guess in the context of Chinese (where disambiguation by character is the big issue), one should speak of homophones?
- FabHK 8y ago
  On this issue, see also "The Homonym problem", in Wm. C. Hannas, Asia's Orthographic Dilemma: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/east_asian_languages.html#homonyms http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/east_asian_languages.html#...

zavi 8y ago

There's order of magnitude more homonyms in Mandarin than English to the point where having a pictograms system starts making sense. That's why 80 percent of characters are multipart with one of the radicals carrying the pronunciation.

knolax 8y ago

Homonyms don't exist in every language to the extant that you can write an entire essay with them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...

tivert 8y ago
> Homonyms don't exist in every language to the extant that you can write an entire essay with them. Homonyms like that don't exist in any living language. Spoken Classical Chinese is a dead language, like Latin. You only get that effect when you use modern Mandarin pronunciations, they wouldn't have been homonyms if you didn't use anachronous pronunciations. It's sort of like writing a poem that means one thing in Latin and an entirely different thing in modern Italian.
- knolax 8y ago
  Yet Classical Chinese is still a large part of Chinese literary canon, partially because the writing system allows for written Classical Chinese to comprehended by modern readers. There are no examples to "Lion-Eating Poet" in Italian and English precisely because phonetic writing systems cause most writing to be incomprehensible as pronounciations change. Your example is also egregious also because the entire point of "Lion-Eating Poet" isn't that "it means different things in classical and modern Chinese" but that semantical meaning can still be transmitted by the writing system completely independent of pronounciation.
  - tivert 8y ago
    > Yet Classical Chinese is still a large part of Chinese literary canon, partially because the writing system allows for written Classical Chinese to comprehended by modern readers. But only essentially though translation. It's different enough that a typical Chinese reader can't jump into those works with ease. Latin works are still part of the Western literary canon, and for many centuries Europeans went though the trouble of learning Latin to read them. You can still find fossilized Latin phrases in modern languages like English, et cetera. That doesn't mean Latin is a truly living language. > There are no examples to "Lion-Eating Poet" in Italian and English precisely because phonetic writing systems cause most writing to be incomprehensible as pronounciations change. > Your example is also egregious also because the entire point of "Lion-Eating Poet" isn't that "it means different things in classical and modern Chinese" but that semantical meaning can still be transmitted by the writing system completely independent of pronounciation. There can be no exact analogy because phonetic writing systems are more conserving of pronunciation while systems like Chinese are more conserving of semantics. That's why I said it's "it's sort of like." My point was the poem is more of a stunt than a real statement about a real language.
    - knolax 8y ago
      >But only essentially though translation. Classical works are not translated into Modern Chinese. I think that's the source of our disagreement. When the writing system is focused on semantics, then the threshold where something is considered translation is different than for a phonetic writing system. >Latin works are still part of the Western literary canon. Yes, but most modern westerners can not read Latin on it's own, because of the writing system. >My point was the poem is more of a stunt than a real statement about a real language. What is a "real language" here? The poem is comprehensible to modern Chinese, although the grammar follows Classical Conventions. What makes it not a "real language"?
      - tivert 8y ago
        > What is a "real language" here? The poem is comprehensible to modern Chinese, although the grammar follows Classical Conventions. What makes it not a "real language"? I should have been more specific: I meant a real living language. The poem is a stunt that demonstrates how far modern Mandarin pronunciation has diverged from Classical Chinese (which is dead as a spoken language), but it doesn't make much of a statement about the practicality of replacing hanzi with a phonetic system for writing modern living Mandarin.
sanqui 8y ago
Homonyms are words that are pronounced the same way. These words use different tones.
- simplify 8y ago
  There are four tones. The poem has 33 unique words.
- FabHK 8y ago
  Good point. Beyond that, FWIW, homophones are words that are pronounced the same way. Homonyms are pronounced and spelt the same way. I guess in the context of Chinese (where disambiguation by character is the big issue), one should speak of homophones?
FabHK 8y ago
On this issue, see also "The Homonym problem", in Wm. C. Hannas, Asia's Orthographic Dilemma: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/east_asian_languages.html#homonyms http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/east_asian_languages.html#...