Modern Standard Mandarin has way fewer syllables than Middle Chinese and Southern Chinese languages which makes homophones a lore more common. Vietnamese didn't really have this problem because the phonology is a lot more complex and it shows through the written word.
An example of homophones creating ambiguity: An Jung-geun was a Korean independence activist who assassinated a former Japanese Prime Minister in 1909. He is often called 義士 in Korean textbooks which means "hero, man of honor". However, 義士(의사) is pronounced in the same way as 醫師(의사) which means "doctor". The Hangul spelling is identical thus it has led to many younger Koreans to think An Jung-geun was a doctor and question why would a doctor intentionally kill someone. It's more of a tongue-in-cheek joke but it shows the problem of completely detaching a writing system from a language that does not sufficiently distinguish words without context. In Chinese this is not a problem because by people usually learn this type of stuff on paper first. The additional context helps reduce the ambiguity in spoken conversation. Being able to talk to each other without writing is not sufficient proof that a writing system can be abolished with minimal impact, because it ignores the fact that the writing system is what helped to dispel the ambiguity in the first place.
Is this a problem when speaking? How many times a day do speakers of Chinese have to ask a collaborator which homophone they are using?
That makes sense! Since names will always lack disambiguating context. And I've seen that in Chinese movies come to think of it.
It happens in English too: Is your name Kerry or Carrie?
Did you read the example I wrote? Homophones usually aren't a problem because most people learn things in writing first, and that provides context in speech.
I read that, but I'm having trouble imagining how that works.
Do you have an example?
"Queue" and "cue" which are homophones in English. Now imagine if there is a language reform where IPA replaces the current writing system, and both words are replaced with /kjuː/ as the only written form.
"/kjuː/ the crowd" can be either "Queue the crowd" or "Cue the crowd". We are aware these two words are distinct from each other, since we learned these two words in their written form already, and in certain situations we won't have any ambiguity as to which action needs to be taken. If the reform lasts long enough that a new generation of people grows up only learning "/kjuː/" and not "queue/cue", they won't be so sure about which action is to be taken in "/kjuː/ the people" when it is presented as an isolated phrase without context.
Think of a hash table that resolves hash collisions via separate chaining. The collision is when words sound the same (have the same index). Abolishing the current writing system is like dumpking the bucket contents and only returning the index. It's not an immediate problem because we still know that the bucket used to contain chained entries ("cached" in our brain memories"). Those who have never accessed the hash table (e.g. younger generations receiving education after the change) won't know what was in there before. They just know the index but not that there used to be two different data entries stored at the same index. The downside of losing information should be evident.
"I heard a wail and I saw a whale" or "The knight was black"
are more tractable than the problems arising from
"When I lie, I lie on a bed" or "British left waffles on Falklands"
Is that right?
I'm not so sure. Given that you can only hear but not see, I feel they're probably equally problematic when there is not sufficient context to resolve the ambiguity.
The thing that changes if you move to a phonetics-based writing system, is that you're forced to include more context while writing. I don't think anything changes about oral communication. (But I'm happy to be refuted!)
That would be a fundamental change for the language itself and I don't see why would it ever be necessary.
A person who has never heard of the first two sentences you mentioned will not be able to understand the meaning until you provide a long explaination of which word is which ("more context"), or just write down the sentence itself. Which one is faster and more concise? I don't see how does "British left waffles on Falklands" involve any homophones at all. Ambiguity of homophones can be resolved via context, but that's not one-and-the-same as all "out of context" sentences.
The beauty of the Chinese language is that it can be incredibly concise on paper despite having the same sentence sound like gibberish when read, which is not a problem as long as the current writing system still exists. The information density in East Asian languages are higher in general thanks to this.
If you have absolutely no context and know nothing about politics or human society, you'll probably take it to mean that the British went to the Falkland islands and then when they left the left behind some waffles.
In actuality it meant that someone was waffling on a decision to be made regarding the Falklands ("waffling" means being indecisive) and that someone was "the British Left" (the liberal faction of parliament).
[0] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-haber/british-left-w...
Do you have a good example of a common sentence/thought/idea that is expressed with much greater concision in written chinese than spoken?
Surely a basic sentence like "mingtian wo xuexi yihou qu ti zuqiu" can't really get much shorter?
Hopefully that's a real sentence. I speak mandarin at something like the level of a 3-year-old kid.
床前明月光，
疑是地上霜。
举头望明月，
低头思故乡。
Bed before bright moon shine
Think be ground on frost
Raise head hope bright moon
Lower head think home
Beside my bed a pool of light—
Is it hoarfrost on the ground?
I lift my eyes and see the moon,
I bend my head and think of home.
Before my bed, the moon shines bright;
Be it frost aground? I suppose it might.
I lift my head, the moon to behold, then
Lower it, musing: I'm homesick tonight.
Wikipedia says [3]:
"Classical Chinese is distinguished from written vernacular Chinese in its style, which appears extremely concise and compact to modern Chinese speakers, and to some extent in the use of different lexical items (vocabulary). An essay in Classical Chinese, for example, might use half as many Chinese characters as in vernacular Chinese to relate the same content." "Classical Chinese rarely uses words composed of two Chinese characters; nearly all words are of one syllable only. This stands directly in contrast with modern Northern Chinese varieties including Mandarin, in which two-syllable, three-syllable, and four-syllable words are extremely common." "However, even with knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, Classical Chinese can be difficult to understand by native speakers of modern Chinese, because of its heavy use of literary references and allusions as well as its extremely abbreviated style."
However, I don't have a neat example at hand... Anyone?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Night_Thought
[2] http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese#Grammar_and_...
As a poem, it has no equivalent rendering in colloquial Chinese. Also as a poem, it deliberate sheds information, permitting (or even pursuing?) ambiguity in its quest for specific phonics, scansion, symbolism (in many cases - maybe not in this one), etc.
Probably the way to get an example is to start from something spoken in modern Chinese and see how it comes out different in written Chinese?