3 ms·
> Chinese uses a system where every morpheme has it's own grapheme with some minor exceptions. Almost every grapheme maps to a single morpheme and thus a single
by yorwba 6y ago
> Chinese uses a system where every morpheme has it's own grapheme with some minor exceptions. Almost every grapheme maps to a single morpheme and thus a single pronunciation
"Almost" being the key word here. I found 1043 Traditional Chinese characters which have more than one pronunciation in CC-CEDICT (ignoring fifth-tone variants). Since that's such a short list, I'll include it in full here:
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Interestingly, the equivalent list for Simplified Chinese is shorter (only 1013 characters) because, although many characters with different pronunciation have been unified, many of those already had more than one pronunciation in Traditional Chinese, so the total number of characters with multiple pronunciations decreased.
Some of those are cases where one grapheme represents multiple morphemes, e.g. 的 (number 15 in the list), which originally represented a target (as in 目的 mù dì aim, objective) but is more commonly used as a grammatical particle (as in 我的書 wǒ de shū my book) and purely as a phonetic sign in 的士 (dī shì/dí shì taxi).
Others are remnants of derivational processes similar to English "foot" vs. "feet", e.g. 中 (third last in the list) pronounced zhōng as a noun (center, middle) but zhòng as a verb (as in 中的 zhòng dì hit the target).
In a reply to a reply, you give the example of English "a" turning into "an" if the following word starts with a vowel. That's analogous to 一 (yī one) changing tone depending on the following syllable, e.g. 一個 (yí gè one), 一起 (yì qǐ together).
Then there's register differences like 血 (xiě/xuè/xuě informal/formal/confused for blood) as in 出血 (chū xiě bleed) vs 血壓 (xuè yā blood pressure)
And that's just the standard language. In everyday speech, people have another set of colloquial vocabulary to draw on, which they may or may not be able to associate with corresponding characters.
It's not as complex as Japanese, but the relationship between writing and pronunciation isn't quite one-to-one for Chinese either.