Comment on Geoffrey Sampson, “A Chinese phonological enigma”

Mieko Ogura

Abstract 摘要
The author explores various ways to resolve the paradox: language change avoids creating excessive homophony, while sound changes in the history of Chinese have created a massive level of homophony. In this comment, I consider why homophones occur even though humans try to manifest one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning based on the CELEX lexical database of English, version 2.5 (1995) and the evolution of diatones in English, and its implication to Chinese. Table 1 shows the number of homophones classified according to the syllable number in columns and the number of words in a homophone set in rows. The total number of types of words classified according to the syllable number is also given in parentheses. We find that 11,980 or 22.8 % of 52,447 words are homophones in Present-day English. The number of homophones decreases as the number of words in a homophone set increases, and the percentage of homophones for each syllable number decreases as the syllable number increases. Table 1 suggests a threshold of homophones in English that can be tolerated. We also find that 4,743, or 70.2 % of 6,761 one syllable words and 4,509, or 27.3% of 18,564 two syllable words are homophones, and they form 77.2% of all homophones.