Hi Mark,Mark Yong wrote:Quite frankly, I am really amazed how the Koreans manage it so well with Hangeul, as well-evidenced in their world-class literacy rates. My favourite example (taken from the Wikipedia article on Hanja) is sudo 수도:
修道 — spiritual discipline
受渡 — receipt and delivery
囚徒 — prisoner
水都 — 'city of water' (e.g. Venice or Hong Kong)
水稻 — rice
水道 — drain
隧道 — tunnel
水道 — rivers, path of surface water
首都 — capital (city)
手刀 — hand-knife
Thanks for the very interesting list for "sudo" in Korean. As soon as I saw it, I remembered a similar list for Japanese, from one of my favourite books: "Writing Systems" by Geoffrey Sampson (Hutchinson, 1985/87; ISBN 0 09 173051 1). I had forgotten that he also compares the situation in Japanese to the one in Korean, until I started reading it again, when re-typing this extract for the Forum. It would appear that he considers the situation in Japanese even "worse" than that in Korean.
This extract - concerning "homonyms in Japanese" - is from Chapter 9, p178-179 of the book cited above. I've taken the liberty of changing his renditions of the Mandarin pronunciation from IPA to pinyin, as I think that that's easier for the readers of this Forum.
<extract>
It is true that Middle Chinese had more phonological distinctions than modern Mandarin Chinese, and there are a handful of contrasts which are lost in modern Chinese but have been preserved in Sino-Japanese. But such cases are few, whereas there are very many distinctions that are preserved in Chinese but absent in Sino-Japanese. Remember that Chinese is already a language in which a large number of morphemes are shared out between a relatively small number of distinct phonological syllables. When the effect of Japanizing the pronunciation is added, the result is a truly colossal degree of homophony in the Sino-Japanese vocabulary. This is why I suggested earlier that purely phonographic script, though feasible for Koreans, is not feasible for Japanese: Sino-Korean phonology maintains many of the contrasts lost in modern Chinese, but Sino-Japanese has even fewer contrast than Chinese.
To illustrate, I give a sample of the different Chinese morphemes which all exist in the (modern, living) Japanese language with the Sino-Japanese pronunciation /kan/. As can be seen, each morpheme in the list has a distinct pronunciation even in the phonologically-impoverished modern Mandarin version of Chinese; each of the morphemes listed naturally has several Chinese homophones, most of which also exist in Japanese as /kan/, and this list by no means exhausts the range of phonologically-distinct Chinese syllables corresponding to Sino-Japanese /kan/.
甘 gan1 'sweet'
感 gan3 'be affected'
刊 kan1 'print'
慣 guan4 'be accustomed to'
觀 guan1 'view'
勘 kan4 'investigate'
緩 huan3 'slow'
管 guan3 'tube'
鐶 huan2 'a ring'
歡 huan1 'enjoy'
卷 juan4 'a volume'
韓 han2 'Korean'
漢 han4 'Chinese'
etc, etc
all pronounced in Japanese 'kan'.
With Chinese, although there are very many homophones among morphemes taken singly, two-morpheme compounds are usually unambiguous: if a vocabulary-item consists of a pair of syllables XY it tends to be the case that only one of the various morphemes pronounced X and one of the morphemes pronounced Y fit together as a recognized compound. With the massive level of homophony found in Sino-Japanese, however, even this is far from true. To give just one example: the disyllabic /kankō/ is ambiguous as between all of the following Sino-Japanese compound words (among others); again I give the Chinese pronunciation for comparison:
甘汞 gan1 gong3 'mercurous chloride'
感光 gan3 guang1 'expose (photographically)'
刊行 kan1 xing2 'publication'
慣行 guan4 xing2 'habitual'
觀光 guan1 guang1 'sightseeing'
勘考 kan4 kao3 'consider'
緩行 huan3 xing2 'run slow'
etc
all pronounced in Japanese 'kankō'.
If the Chinese language had developed this degree of homophony in the course of its evolution, no doubt it would have taken measures of one sort or another to solve the problem (as indeed did happen when monomorphemic words in classical Chinese were replaced by compounds in the modern spoken language). But Japanese is, as it were, at the mercy of Chinese - from the point of view of Japanese society, Chinese is the authoritative source both of non-native morphemes and, to a large extent, of the approved ways of compounding them. If the result of adapting this stock of roots to Japanese habits of pronunciation is a vocabulary which is extremely ambiguous in its spoken form, that is just bad luck for the Japanese. There are isolated parallels in English: it is unfortunate for us that the Romans used words for 'mouth' and 'ear', ōris and auris, which (while sounding quite different in Latin) fall together in the confusing pair of English homophones oral and aural. Life would be more convenient for us if we decided to use, say, gaur- rather than aur- as the root for 'ear' in technical vocabulary; but we feel that Latin is a fixed given, so we cannot do this and must tolerate the unfortunate consequences of using the genuine roots. For the Japanese this situation is multiplied thousands of times over. This implies, among other things, that the logographic nature of Chinese writing is even more important for the Japanese than for the Chinese.
</extract>
Notes:
1. Please note that I know absolutely no Japanese, so I'm purely quoting what the author says, though what he says makes a lot of sense to me.
2. The author doesn't stress something which I think is worth pointing out (perhaps he thinks it's too obvious to need pointing out!), namely that in the process which he called "Japanizing" (of Chinese pronunciation, to fit Japanese morphology), not only is there a loss of distinction because there are fewer distinct consonants and vowels in Japanese than in Chinese, but just the fact alone of the absence of tone in Japanese means that (what are now still) 4 distinct syllables in Modern Mandarin would merge into one syllable in Japanese.
3. While I agree with most of what he says above, it isn't the case that two-syllable words in Mandarin Chinese are almost completely unambiguous. Even in my very limited vocabulary I already know of three pairs:
- bi4 xu1: 必須 "must, have to" / 必需, "need to, require, essential, indispensible".
- deng1 ji1: 登機 "to board a plane" / 登基 "to ascend the throne".
- xie1 zi0: 楔子 "wedge" / 蠍子 "scorpion".
But this level of homophony is probably no worse than any other language, and can easily be disambiguated by context in speech (in writing, there is of course no problem - this being the one aspect of the Chinese writing system which it excels in). In any case, he does say 'usually unambiguous' and 'tends to be [distinct]' anyway.
4. The author says (my emphasis):
"But Japanese is, as it were, at the mercy of Chinese - from the point of view of Japanese society, Chinese is the authoritative source both of non-native morphemes and, to a large extent, of the approved ways of compounding them."
For most of the long history of Japan, this was undoubtedly the case, but I question if it's a valid assertion in the period from the late 19th to early 20th century (and certainly not nowadays, where English probably has a far stronger influence). As the modernization of Japan took place earlier and at a faster rate than that of China in that crucial period, it was Japanese - as has been discussed here in the Forum too - which served as the model for Chinese, in coining new words for the modern age; albeit in a way which - because of the previous long history the other way around - was entirely in the spirit of (and indeed, indistinguishable from the methods used in) the Chinese language.
Again, this is no way detracts from the validity of the basic point (the problem of "too many homonyms" in Japanese) as all this occurred way before the late 19th century, but for the reason I give, I would have preferred "was" instead of "is" in the sentence above.