Homophony in Chinese

First of all, what does the word ‘homophony’ means? ‘Homo’ means the same and ‘phon’ means sound. Homophony then refers to the phenomenon of words with different meanings having the same sound. Those words are called homonyms or homophones.

Some examples. In English, the spelling of ‘saw’ can mean at least two different things, i.e., a tool for carpenters or the past tense for the verb ‘to see’. Interestingly, the present tense of the same verb also has two meanings, i.e., perception by eye and the religious reference to the seat of power as in “the holy see”.

The examples just given have identical spellings for the different meanings as well as identical sounds. But homophony is not restricted to such cases at all. ‘meat’ and ‘meet’ are not spelled the same and yet they have different meanings but identical sounds. So they are bone-fide homophones.

Two facts about Chinese languages lead to the extreme degree of homophony in Chinese. As we saw, compared to English, Chinese languages have much smaller number of possible syllables, having very simple syllable structures. Another fact is the monosyllabic nature of Chinese morphemes, one morpheme having only one syllable. These two facts taken together mean that there are smaller number of syllables for forming morphemes. Given the large number of meanings any language has to express, many morphemes then have to share the same syllables. Homophony thus results. But just a small syllable inventory alone is not sufficient to cause homophony. Japanese has an even smaller syllable inventory than Chinese. But as Japanese morphemes can be multi-syllabic, there can thus be much more combinatorial possibilities when forming morphemes.

Homophones abound in all dialects of Chinese. As how words are written really is not relevant to the discussion of homophony, which is about the sameness of sounds, we will no longer concern ourselves with how these homophones are written. We will only present them in the phonetic spelling of pinyin.

Take the example of the syllable spelled in pinyin as shì. It has no less than 20 distinct meanings:

Matter, To be, Generation, Try, Style, City, Room, View/vision, Persimmon, To show, Official, Promise, Pass, Power, Explain, Resemble, Decorate, To suite, To wait on, To lick

We do not have to go far to find other homonyms. Just take a tonal variant of the syllable shì, i.e., shǐ, which has the following meanings:

History, Shit, To cause, Start, Pig, To steer, Arrow

The other tonal variants of the same syllable, i.e., shí and shī, also have many homophones. If you are not entirely convinced of any of this, go check it out in a dictionary. In fact, you will appreciate the full extent of homophony in Chinese by browsing through a page from an alphabetically ordered Chinese dictionary. Consecutively listed will be all the different meanings of the same syllable, with the same tone. If you disregard the differences in tones, even more meanings will be available for the same syllable.

Those who have used Chinese word processors will get a good sense of homophony, which is a constant annoyance and obstacle to typing speed. When you type in a syllable, you will be presented a list, the length of which depending on the number of homonyms available to that syllable, and you have to choose the one you want from that list. The usual remedy for this situation is try to use multi-syllabic words rather than single syllables as the units of input, leaving no space between the syllables. Although homophones that are longer than one syllables do exist, they are far fewer in number.

It may also be due to homophony that language ‘taboo’ is particularly strong in Chinese. If a syllable may have a negative meaning among its possible meanings, people may avoid using the syllable altogether. Even near homophony can trigger ‘taboo’. Sì ‘four’ and sǐ ‘die’ are not the same in tone, so they are not completely homophonous. And yet the avoidance of the number 4 is widespread: there may not be a fourth floor to a building and so on.

Although homophony admittedly impedes communication to some extent, it has been taken advantage of by Chinese as well. It may be due to the abundance of homophony that Chinese likes to use a lot of ‘puns’, syllables that can have more than one meanings. And the opposite of ‘taboo’ also occurs, i.e., the deliberate choice of a syllable that may have a positive meaning.

Do dialects differ in the amount of homophony? Definitely. Take the examples of Mandarin and Cantonese. As we know, Cantonese has far richer resources than Mandarin in the sense that it has twice as many tones and three times as many final consonants. Simple mathematics dictates that there will be much more possible syllables in Cantonese. Since the amount of homophony is inversely related to the number of available syllables, Cantonese has to have less homophony.