4 ms·
Mandarin has a lot of homophones (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_
by wickedchicken 16y ago
Mandarin has a lot of homophones (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...) so it's tough to claim a purely phonetic system is 'far better.' It certainly has advantages, but the issue is not as clear cut as, say, arabic numerals vs. roman.
- bane 16y agoI remember seeing a proposal years ago that dealt with that problem by producing a standardized listing of Chinese homophones, numbered and ordered. In Pin Yin or Bopomofo one could clarify a homophone with a simple numeric subscript that somebody could simply look up in a dictionary. Most of the time you could leave them off and just rely on context. It had applications outside of China as well for countries with large Sino-loan word lexicons like Korean (a language which deals with the homophone problem routinely but has no standardized system for sorting it out without putting the Chinese root in parens). Most of the homophones are sorted out with the tonal marks anyways, and in cases where that doesn't clarify enough, there's usually less than 9 homophones anyways making a single numeric subscript a reasonable clarifier.