How do characters with same sound work in Chinese?

[Anhalyer]

Hi all,
 
I hope this doesn't sound confusing but I currently trying to learn the linguistic part of Chinese since I want to add diversity in the conscripted language that I'm creating (as in a language that I'm making up.)
 
So I roughly understand the idea of multiple characters/meanings in Chinese but I'm still more confused about the multiple characters part or the words that have no initial character but a general meaning of some topic such as lû which means generally means to capture yet its also closely related to water. I have a feeling that I'm wrong. I'm using this website http://zhongwen.com/index.html to site my claim) 
 
So how can it mean two very diverse things at the same time?

[陳德聰]

Can you clarify what your question is? If you are asking how is it that one glyph can be used to represent multiple meanings, the answer is context. If you're asking how a character can not mean much of anything by itself but when combined with other characters it is part of words which have many different meanings, the answer is that is sometimes a character or component of a character can be used for its meaning or just for its sound.

[Shelley]

Hello and welcome,

 

lǔ  to capture -  is 3rd tone and is written 虏

 

lù as in clear water -  is 4th tone and is written 渌

 

it does not mean 2 widely different things, it is two separate things, it is pronounced differently and written differently.

 

Unfortunately Chinese is not one of those languages you can extract what you want without learning quite a lot.

 

The mark above your word lû is incorrect.

 

If you want to use Chinese in your "made up language" you will have to understand more about chinese and therefore you will have to study chinese more

 

[Anhalyer]

Well that's true for every language Shelly but yeah I'll need to learn more about Chinese so that I can add it into my Conglang 

[PBolchover]

Different characters can have different meanings, even if they are pronounced identically.  To take your example, 掳 (capture) 卤 (brine) are both pronounced lǔ, but are two completely different words, in the same way that "Hi" and "High" are different words in English that are pronounced the same, but written differently.

 

A character in Chinese corresponds to a single syllable.  Historically, each word was a single syllable, so 1 character = 1 word.  Nowadays however, many (?most?) "words" have two or more syllables, so it is incorrect to say that 1 character = 1 word (in the way that we think a "word" English).  It is probably more correct to think of it as 1 character = 1 phoneme.  Or alternatively, you can think of the meanings of characters as being similar to the greek and latin roots in modern English words.  For example 电视 diànshì= television, with the characters having the meaning of "lightning" and "to look at", in the same way that the English word has the meanings of "far" + "sight"

[Hofmann]

Long story short, homophones exist (in any language) because

• They were homophones in the first place, and have evolved regularly.
• They were at some point not homophones and merged in pronunciation.
• They are actually two words with similar (enough) meanings to be considered the same "word" and perhaps even written the same way, i.e. they are homonyms. Let's say there's a language where "green" and "water" are written and pronounced the same way. (Not implausible because some have claimed a link between Japanese "mizu" and "midori.") Then these things would be homonyms even though in the languages you know they are very separate concepts and words.

[Shelley]

Well that's true for every language

 

Yes, but I think it is more so for chinese.

[889]

Nobody's mentioned it yet -- perhaps it's too obvious for everyone except the OP -- but written and spoken Chinese have different vocabularies, and characters like 渌 rarely show up in speech except as part of a word combination or a name, perhaps. Thus the apparent problem of so many homophones in Chinese isn't as great as it might seem.

[Shelley]

Good point 889, as you say its something I take for granted, that is one of the main reasons for most "words" to be composed of 2 characters,

[LiMo]

It seems to me that PBolchover has kind of hit the nail on the head as to where the confusion is. It sounds to me like OP is taking single characters and phonemes (is lu a phoneme, my linguistics vocabulary is mostly gleaned from these forums and context) to be actual words, whereas in modern Chinese most words are two characters long. The main thing to remember is that the pinyin has to be taken as a whole. The tone is just as important as the initials and finals. As Shelley says, you've unwittingly compared two different things.

That website looks good in some ways, but without any annotation to explain the etymology (NB. I haven't searched it comprehensively) I don't think it will suit your needs  for finding out much about Chinese script. I've noticed that there's an FAQ about Chinese characters and it seems to be quite comprehensive for a quick beginners guide to the script. If you haven't checked it out already I think it would be a good help.

[陳德聰]

I think the word you're both looking for is "morpheme".

[Gharial]

Most if not all languages seem to have used rebuses at some point in their development - pictures or symbols used to write similar-sounding words (but words which would often be more taxing to draw clearly or unambiguously enough compared to the rebus substituting for them). For example, lái 來 (simplified: 来) originally meant just 'wheat', but also came to be used to mean 'to come, arrive', the latter of which must've seemed a harder concept to draw. (Nowadays wheat is written mài 麥(麦), which is a Kangxi radical. Note the addition of 夂 at the base, presumably to thus distinguish the wheat meaning from the rebus meaning come. Note also 徠(徕). 來 thus became distinguished and branched two ways, into 麥 versus 徠, but nowadays 來 is the preferred form for the latter, with 徠 apparently appearing primarily in the compound zhāolái 招徠, solicit (customers)).

 

English children for one can have reason to return to rebuses when they write picture messages such as eye - tin can - sea waves - female sheep or perhaps (depending on the abilities of the artist and suitability of the materials) a hand with finger pointing in a 3D manner towards the reader: "I can see you".

 

China however and for reasons best known to itself never developed a relatively limited (morpho)syllabary even when the principle of the rebus had been discovered and employed there, instead generally preferring to create yet more characters whenever the need arose (despite the phonetic components often repeating uses established in other characters), a process which is still ongoing e.g. when naming new chemical elements.

 

Hence IIRC the almost 60,000 recorded characters (many thankfully obsolete) rather than a possible syllabary of only some 400 odd glyphs (with the presumable addition of tone marks) being a perfectly workable idea, at least in theory (though why not then just use Pinyin nowadays LOL). Puttering along with several thousand unique characters seems however a reasonable compromise and a means of preserving a link with the past yadda yadda, and quite a few people have never warmed to even (the) character simplifications, so...

 

There is basically a lot of redundancy (though it may appear or be cast as useful and a boon) in a system as complex as Chinese writing became and still is. Why have just one or two ways to write a sound when you can have dozens, all of them "disambiguating" themselves in some way from the competing mass. Ah, what a beautiful binful of discarded calligraphy attempts!

 

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/visible/index.html

[lips]

When you look at things only from your own perspective you can always find fault with others.

[Gharial]

I'm not sure what you're saying, Lips.

 

Every writing system has its own hurdles and potential problems, as well as possible advantages (we could for example discuss English's somewhat "irregular" spelling, a charge I as a Brit wouldn't take too much offence at, versus how that helps preserve "etymological" details from at least the time the spelling became more or less fixed), and it would be silly to pretend that Chinese doesn't present more than its fair share of problems, or certainly more complexity and complications than most. Even those who generally enjoy studying Chinese (most here, I suspect, including me) must sometimes, indeed quite often, consider the hanzi a bit of a PITA. But provided one acknowledges they can be a PITA, they ultimately aren't too big a problem for the motivated learner (native speakers with little apparent choice in the matter; foreign learners aiming to do more than just converse; etc).