[LittleCloud]

Interesting examples from that wicked language, thank you! (Studied French before but unfortunately lost interest.)

You're right about the context and grammar being usually sufficient to disambiguate. I thought about the examples 話す ("hanâsu"; to talk) and 離す ("hanâsu"; to separate) I gave earlier, and I don't remember ever confusing the two in speech dialogue. But it's probably that there are enough non-homophonous near-synonyms for these words in Japanese that would get used in practice, if we imagine contexts where a word could conceivably be confused with another homophone, e.g. 言う【いう】, 喋る【しゃべる】, 語る【かたる】 in the case of 話す【はなす】.

The above words are "native" Japanese words 和語. Definitely the problem of homophones is way less serious for those words than for Sino-Japanese vocabulary, 漢語.

I think Japanese is untypical in that it's a language with a limited repertoire of syllables adopting words from a language with a much richer system of sounds, Chinese, and trying to map the (compound) words character by character. By the way, that probably relates to why most learners find pronunciation of any variety of Chinese to be difficult; the language needs to make the necessary aural distinctions, including tone (famously), which are apparently subtle to non-native speakers.

There are countless two-syllable compound words in Chinese, a good portion being used in common speech, but of the ones adopted into Japanese, many of them turn into essentially two "syllables" also. (Actually, some modern terms are back-borrowings from Japanese coinages through writing, just so that I'm being fair and historically accurate in this comment.)

Of these terms there is at least a few, that in Japanese, would be confused in speech, that in practice the pronunciation gets mangled to disambiguate. Here are some examples:

私立 ("privately established (institution, organization, etc.)") versus 市立 ("municipally established") has the following disambiguation in common speech:

  私立【しりつ】→【わたくしりつ】

  市立【しりつ】→【いちりつ】

科学 ("science") versus 化学 ("chemistry") has the disambiguation:

  化学【かがく】→【ばけがく】 (as if the word were 化け学 but it's never written that way)

Basically the native Japanese reading of a character 訓読み is substituted for the Sino-Japanese reading 音読み in speech, even though the latter is the proper, original reading for that character in the word in question it occurs in.

For the reader's curiosity, there's also one case of pronunciation mangling that I know in Mandarin Chinese:

炎 ("inflammation") versus 癌 ("cancer"):

  In Mandarin, we have 炎 yán, 癌 ái even though the sound value of 癌 ought to have been also yán, homophonous with 岩 according to the rules of sound change over the centuries.  Contrast with the following:

  Cantonese 炎 jim4, 癌 ngaam4, 岩 ngaam4
  Japanese 炎 en エン 癌 gan ガン, 岩 gan ガン

Basically it's the consequence of packing too much information onto individual syllables/characters while Western languages would simply devise longer words (with more syllables) for more sophisticated/technical concepts.

[astrobe_]

> Interesting examples from that wicked language, thank you! (Studied French before but unfortunately lost interest.)

I won't blame you, as this was my thought when I wrote it.