Homophones

A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning or in spelling.

Opinion and Hypothesis#

Learning Japanese as my third language (fourth, if you count Javanese), I have always found that the limited sounds in Japanese (read gojūon) creates so many homophones. The vocabularies that exist in the Japanese language is closely related to Mandarin Chinese, due to the use of Kanji (or Hanzi). However, Japanese only uses the same characters, and not sounds. In fact, sounds that exist in the Japanese language fails to reproduce all the different consonants, vowels, and tones from Chinese. Let’s see an example below.

Chinese character	Meaning	Japanese sound	Mandarin sound (Pinyin)
声	voice	sei	shēng
姓	surname	sei	xìng
精	spirit, energy	sei	jīng
省	reflect, province	sei/shō	shěng / xǐng
静	quiet	sei	jìng
勢	power, force	sei	shì
政	politics	sei	zhèng
整	organize, neat	sei	zhěng
性	nature, gender	sei	xìng
生	life, birth	sei	shēng
正	correct, proper	sei	zhèng
清	clear, pure	sei	qīng
青	blue, green, youthful	sei	qīng
成	become	sei	chéng
請	ask, request	sei	qǐng

Despite some exceptions, the 18 characters have distinct sounds in Mandarin, which are perfectly distinguishable by Mandarin speakers. However, almost all 18 characters have the same indistinguishable reading in Japanese. It is important to note that, however, most Chinese characters are used in along with other Chinese characters, creating more combinations. Let’s take a look at the same phenomenon in a 2-character pair words.

Chinese character	Meaning	Japanese sound	Mandarin sound (pinyin)
公正	fairness	こうせい	gōngzhèng
恒星	fixed star	こうせい	héngxīng
更生	rehabilitation	こうせい	gēngshēng
校正	proofreading	こうせい	jiàozhèng
構成	composition	こうせい	gòuchéng

The reading こう (kou) is very common in Japanese kanji, and the table above showing 5 words that readこうせい (kousei) of the same meaning.

You may blame the Japanese language for this flaw, but this is not only unique to Japanese. In English, the word match as a noun has at least 4 meanings.

In fact, the English example not only has the same sound (pronunciation), but also the same writing. This makes pinpointing the meaning of the word match entirely contextual in literature. On the other hand, due to the use of kanji in Japanese writing, all examples can easily be distinguished from one another, eliminating the confusion.

On a task to judge the efficiency of a language, one must put away their biases. We tend to think foreign languages possess complicated rules. However, it’s difficult to eliminate all biases, as most people only have one native language (read simultaneous bilingualism). A good example of this is the act of counting numbers. As you might have experienced, if you’re fluent in more than a language, you would still tend to count or read numbers in your first language. This highlights the necessity of establishing scientific methods to measure the efficiency of a language. However, humans are not all-efficient machines. We don’t wait until a language is perfected before releasing it to the mass. We move on despite the flaws in our mother tongues.