If so, that should require much less memorization than memorizing thousands of Chinese characters, and a "morse code" could be made from the phonetic script.
The opposite of it would be "non-inflammable", so it's not really ambiguous. It's just anti-systemic and confusing. "Flammable" isn't supposed to be a word, even though people keep using it.
On the contrary! "Flammable" has been used in English for centuries (https://www.etymonline.com/word/flammable) and at this point it's used intentionally to make it clear that we really do mean something can burn.
Flammable is the obvious construction you get from the Latin, but it's not exactly the word that spread into English. It seems to have been created there later.
Languages will evolve to disambiguate those situations. Vietnamese and Korean already have done so. They have no practical issues communicating with their writing systems.
It's not impossible for Chinese to do the same. Native speakers who learned Chinese through Chinese characters will always find it the most natural, and would surely consider it a pity to lose characters, but if an entire generation is hypothetically brought up reading pinyin only, they will find it the most natural and find ways to disambiguate words on their own. Not saying I support such a shift happening in Chinese, just saying that it's not impossible for the human brain and society to cope with, if it were to happen, and it's not something we (the aging generation) have much say in.
Same may say Japanese can express their language solely in pronunciation (Kana) but this is not true. There are easily 20+ meanings for the same pronunciation and are even hard to distinguish them with context provided. Just open any Japanese dictionary then you will see that it is a completely broken language if without the expressive power of Kanji (or Chinese characters).
For example, the common name Michiko can be written in many different ways with many different meanings, such as:
美智子 — "beautiful wise child"
美千子 — "child of a thousand beauties"
見知子 — "child of recognition"
道子 — "child of the way"
路子 — "child of the road"
倫子 — "child of morals"
皆子 — "child of all"
通子 — "child of passage"> range
Can mean a wide open area, a set of things, a stovetop, a measure, to measure, to vary between extremes, to line up, or to pick an opposite side.
https://www.homophone.com/search?type=begin&q=range
I think what you misinterpreted is that you think "sousou" and "koukou" is a word in Japanese, no, they are sound, the prounciation.
“Dear” and “deer” if you want an explicit English homophone.
If you don't do comparison, of course there is no difference.
If not, what are you saying?
I mean, I'll believe you that there are more homonyms in Japanese, sure, but it must still operate as a spoken language somehow.
Look a doctor, consult a doctor, supervise a doctor, all sound the same, have same phonic transcript, in Japanese, only differ in the Kanji/Chinese character. Either you extend the sentence and write more words, or show that you are sick and have runny nose, otherwise it is hard to convey idea clear without Kanji/Chinese characters.
Often you will see people talk in Japanese will say "erh!?" then stop and both of them are confused. Half of the reason is that people are just guessing what their component trying to convey but as the conversation goes longer and having more context info, they found that they are not talking about the same thing.
With lesser context info e.g. situation, places, visual clues, emotion, intonation, harder you can comprehend.
So you can use Mandarin pinyin, (though there are a lot of homophones) to serialize to a pronunciation, it wouldn't be understandable by a Cantonese speaker.
But a lot of the grammar and words are just different -- at least in the spoken language; and typically subtitles are all in Mandarin.
So my son watches Peppa Pig in Cantonese; I can read most of the subtitles in Mandarin. Peppa will say, "Da4 di, nei2 tai2 ha2!" (Look, Daddy!); but the subtitles will say 爸爸，你看一下！ (ba1 ba! ni3 kan4 yi2 xia4!) Note that only one of those four words is the same (你/ni3/nei2). "da di" (Cantonese) has been replaced with "baba" (Mandarin); "tai2" is replaced with "kan4" (a different character); and "ha2" has been replaced with "yi2 xia4" (an extra word).
"It's all Chinese" is a sort of fiction; and from my outsider's perspective, a fiction which heavily favors Beijing and the Han majority at the expense of the various minority groups. Written Mandarin is pretty close to spoken Mandarin; "official" written Cantonese is very different than spoken Cantonese -- to the extent that the verb "to be" is a completely separate word.
The answer to the question, "How does someone from Beijing understand someone speaking Cantonese?" is generally, "They don't."
But it might be better for literacy in general because it would be much easier to learn. And, though it is a comparably much more trivial issue, better for creating something like a morse code.
That said, I know there are many other issues apart from simple ease of learning that figure in to what language people learn or want to use. Written Chinese has a rich history and culture, and it's tied to people's identity so of course jettisoning it for something arguably more practical with the added downside of loss of mutual intelligibility among those who know written Chinese would likely result in strong opposition.
Alternately, we could all replace our spoken languages with Chinese characters. Then we could all read Chinese subtitles, and reach each others' languages to some extent.
But I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone not already using Chinese characters for their own language who would consider the benefits worth the cost. It seems to me (as an outsider who's been studying the language for a few years) a sort of linguistic "Stockholm syndrome".
Then how can Chinese speakers understand each other when they speak?
This conflates so much. Hanzi (mostly) isn't pronunciation-based[1], but Hanzi is simply one, and a secondary one at that, representation of the language. The primary representation of the language is the spoken representation, and unless Mandarin speakers spend their time in silence, it's very much pronunciation based.
[1] But it make plenty use of rebuses, where you have a character made up of two characters mashed together into a single character, one part indicating the kind of thing (such as a tree), and another giving a word it sounds like.
> Even the meaning of a word change by the pitch.
No, these are distinct words that have different tone contours. We wouldn't call "bat" and "pat" the same word in English, even though the only difference is that they different voicing, nor would we call "stoop" and "stop" the same word when they differ only in vowel length. The same goes for languages with contrasts in aspiration, ingressive vs egressive consonants, and so on. Tone is no different.
> Just open any Japanese dictionary then you will see that it is a completely broken language if without the expressive power of Kanji (or Chinese characters).
Japanese speakers must have awful trouble speaking with one another in that case.
I don't want to repeat but your examples are not the situation in Chinese speaking system. When you write out the sound of different words, they are literally the same e.g. "stop". The distinction is whether you pronounce it in C major or E or G. Same goes for many southeast asia languages although not an expert on those.
> Japanese speakers must have awful trouble speaking with one another in that case.
In fact large chunk of jokes (either modern of traditional) from Japan is due to different vocabularies share the same prounciation.
Even not a small proportion of detective stories' twist comes from different interpretation of the same prounciation. Like someone say something on the phone but misunderstood by the others, or someone writen down a message before dead in Kana (prounciation) instead of Kanji (meaning). The whole story is just playing with those linguistic hash collisions.
i dont know japanese but it sounds like your example is just saying that japanese humor has a lot of puns
The problem with Chinese is not that it is a tone language (not absolute pitch, but relative pitch); the problem is that there are many regional dialects with different tone systems, and other pronunciation differences as well. Not that that's a real problem; English has lots of dialects with very different pronunciation systems, and it's written in a dialect-agnostic way.
could Chinese be written phonetically?
A bit of Wikipedia research suggests possibly yes, this is basically what pinyin is.
Although others in this thread are saying you would potentially lose meaning that way. Surely that would only be the case for written text that’s ambiguous when spoken aloud? Which I can’t think of a situation where that would be a serious problem except for intentional puns.