I spent a huge chunk of my adult life in Taiwan, studied there and worked there. I was familiar with about 40 of the words for elements. >* If people have no d

I spent a huge chunk of my adult life in Taiwan, studied there and worked there. I was familiar with about 40 of the words for elements. >* If people have no difficulty in communicating with other monosyllabic characters, why would they get confused when they refers to chemical elements?* People don't communicate with monosyllabic characters. They communicate with words most of which are polysyllabic in modern Mandarin. Characters and words are not the same, not even remotely. The relationship is character to syllable. I absolutely agree with you that it's natural to create new characters. This is fine. The issue is that the more homophones in a given discussion the more likely you'll have to give some more context and say something like "x__的x" as way to clarify which "x" you're talking about.