One solution to the "many characters sounding the same" problem was turning Chinese into a tonal language. I guess technically that makes them sound different. but even with tones (in modern mandarin Chinese there are 4 tones; in older time there were more; Cantonese reportedly still has 9).
Even with tones though, there are still too many characters sounding exactly the same. In a Chinese dictionary (you might want to pause for a moment and imagine what a Chinese dictionary looks like. if you come across an unknown English word in writing, you can look it up by spelling. but what's the equivalent thing to do for a chinese character?), under any one sound specification, you can easily find 10-20 characters.
where I disagree is that, yes, classic written Chinese is tricky to understand, but not in the sense that they are mostly one-syllable words. they are tricky to understand in the same sense that Shakespearean (or Chaucerian) English was tricky to understand to modern English speakers - due to unfamiliar vocabulary and old-style grammar. if this opinion is valid, I further propose that, when the Chinese talk, they might rely more heavily on semantics to parse sentences in real-time, since based on sound alone there might be too many character candidates. in other words, they use what's being talked about to do some pretty heavy-handed proning as they process incoming syllables.
On Chinese dictionaries. I actually don't think there is any difference from English ones, at least in the way I use them.
When I use an English dictionary I use the word's spelling. I don't check how the word is pronounced when I do this.
When I use a Chinese dictionary I use the number of strokes that make up the character, which puts all the characters in a sort of order not unlike an alphabetical one. I also do not need to know how the word is pronounced when I do this.
There is no such thing as "turning Chinese into a tonal language." Chinese is tonal to begin with. For native speakers, a different tone does sound as distinct as a different phoneme. The problem the poem exemplifies is the sort we run into when we reduce the language into only the phonetics -- a problem I'm not convinced is unique to Chinese. In fact, just the post above pointed to an example of such in English.
Comments
One solution to the "many characters sounding the same" problem was turning Chinese into a tonal language. I guess technically that makes them sound different. but even with tones (in modern mandarin Chinese there are 4 tones; in older time there were more; Cantonese reportedly still has 9).
Even with tones though, there are still too many characters sounding exactly the same. In a Chinese dictionary (you might want to pause for a moment and imagine what a Chinese dictionary looks like. if you come across an unknown English word in writing, you can look it up by spelling. but what's the equivalent thing to do for a chinese character?), under any one sound specification, you can easily find 10-20 characters.
where I disagree is that, yes, classic written Chinese is tricky to understand, but not in the sense that they are mostly one-syllable words. they are tricky to understand in the same sense that Shakespearean (or Chaucerian) English was tricky to understand to modern English speakers - due to unfamiliar vocabulary and old-style grammar. if this opinion is valid, I further propose that, when the Chinese talk, they might rely more heavily on semantics to parse sentences in real-time, since based on sound alone there might be too many character candidates. in other words, they use what's being talked about to do some pretty heavy-handed proning as they process incoming syllables.
On Chinese dictionaries. I actually don't think there is any difference from English ones, at least in the way I use them. When I use an English dictionary I use the word's spelling. I don't check how the word is pronounced when I do this. When I use a Chinese dictionary I use the number of strokes that make up the character, which puts all the characters in a sort of order not unlike an alphabetical one. I also do not need to know how the word is pronounced when I do this.
There is no such thing as "turning Chinese into a tonal language." Chinese is tonal to begin with. For native speakers, a different tone does sound as distinct as a different phoneme. The problem the poem exemplifies is the sort we run into when we reduce the language into only the phonetics -- a problem I'm not convinced is unique to Chinese. In fact, just the post above pointed to an example of such in English.