This is my first entry.
As it happens, I've been trying to become proficient in Japanese for more than 10 years. However, it seems I sort of got stuck. I'm guessing that, even though I'm not really bad at languages, the distance between Dutch (my native language) and Japanese is just too great for my abilities (though, admittedly, it doesn't help that Japan is on the other side of the globe, and that the amount of time I can allocate to study is limited). Having invested already quite some time in the project, I feel reluctant to abandon it entirely, and therefore consider it nowadays merely as an somewhat awkward hobby of mine.
When I came across the Japanese fragment 彼のぐちにはきりがない kare wa guchi ni wa kiri ga nai - ‘there is no limit to his complaining’, I wanted to look closer at kiri, because I already knew several words pronounced kiri (‘mist; fog; spray’, ‘a drill’, ‘a cut; a slice’), but the meaning ‘limit’ was new to me. Considering the verb 切る kiru, ‘to cut’, of which kiri can be a conjugation, this meaning is not surprising (compare English ‘to cut short’ in its meaning of ‘to stop before the end’). However, the reason I felt I had to stop and take note, is that Japanese has so many words that sound similar, that I often feel the need to carefully distinguish the range of meanings and spellings.
As it happens, kiri is a somewhat harmless example of the abundance of homonyms (similar sounding words, also called homophones) in Japanese. The contexts in which one talks about ‘mist’, or ‘a slice’, or a ‘drill’ are very different, and for that reason confusion about kiri is not very likely. Also, four or five different meanings is actually relatively few. Compare for example the word koukai, which has already 10 different meanings, most quite common (the P in parentheses stands for ‘Priority’, which is wwwjdics's way of saying ‘frequent’).
The first four instances of koukai can all be used as verbs, and the first three are in fact very common indeed. In theory it allows you to says silly things like koukaishita koto wo koukaishita, which would be ambiguous of course, but could mean ‘he regretted the revision’.[2] In practice ambiguities like these are avoided almost automatically. Also funny is that both the Red Sea and the Yellow Sea are merged into the same koukai. Since they are written differently, they can be used in texts as they are, but surely a newsreader has to circumvent the word when he has to explain that a ship has been sunk (or boarded or whatever) in the Red Sea between Egypt and Arabia, and not in the Yellow sea of the coast of China.
The first and main reason is simply that the Japanese language has only a small number of sounds---and allows for even less combinations of those sounds.
Why would a language do that? As far as I can see for no real reason really! A linguist might have to say something really smart at this point that nullifies my emphatic no real reason, but I'm not a linguist. It seems to me that languages evolve, but the way they evolve is blind---there is no ultimate goal. Yes, I suppose there are limits. Languages can't evolve to the point that they become unintelligible or unusable for their speakers. I suppose that at that point the speakers actively seek out alternate ways to get the meaning across.[3] In so far as the evolution of languages is functional, it appears to me as ad hoc and unsystematic. For a long time Japanese has been shedding sounds from its inventory, and as a result more and more words ended up sounding the same. Only recently the process has been reversed. A bit. Not on purpose by anybody, just a happy coincidence. Since the time that Japanese actively has started to import words from English (and to a lesser extent from other Western languages) there has been a slight pressure to allow more sounds, and combinations thereof, which has led to adjustments in the kana syllabary as well.
The second reason that Japanese has so many words that sound alike but often mean very different things, is the past influence of Chinese on Japanese. Between the fifth and the ninth century of the common era, Japanese loaned lots and lots of words and expressions from Chinese. Unfortunately, the Chinese language of that period already did not have a particularly rich inventory of sounds either, but worse, the sounds that it did have were either very difficult, or simply impossible for Japanese speakers. In other words, a Chinese vocabulary that was already poorly structured with regard to its sounds, was simplified even further when it was imported into Japanese.[4]
In a bizarre twist that is typical of the haphazard way languages develop, in the centuries that Japan imported words from China, they not only conflated different words into similar or identical sounding words (see the list of words pronounced koukai above for an example). They also managed to import the same words with different pronunciations (and often meanings that had a slightly different meaning or nuance). How? By importing the same word centuries later again. At that time the pronunciation in Chinese may have become slightly different. Or, they imported it from a different dialect (the center of gravity of the Chinese empire shifted from the north to the south in the course of time---and back again). Or for some other reason the adaptation to Japanese had a different result (Japanese phonology changed in the course of that time substantially as well). What a mess!
So why would they want to borrow the same word anyway? There may have been any number of reasons. The ‘new’ word may have had an earlier unknown religious connotation. Or perhaps it pointed to a new phenomenon. Or perhaps the Chinese in the south not only pronounced certain words differently, but used them differently as well. This last bit may sound really fuzzy, but the question what a word is in Classical Chinese can indeed be rather fuzzy, considering they used the character for one word often for other words that sounded similar as well. Yes. That is weird. It's like writing it seems to reign (when you mean it seems to rain) on purpose. The reason the Chinese used to do that? Simply because inventing new unique characters was hard work, and when a certain word lacked a spelling, the only way to convey it in writing was to use a word that sounded somewhat the same.[5]
1. On this site I use waapuro spelling for transliterating Japanese, which has both advantages and disadvantages. An example of the latter is that someone who does not know about waapuro spelling might mispronounce ou. It actually stands for a long o, IPA [o:]. But depending on a readers background, someone might mispronounce ou as the ending of English cow. To bad. Lots of languages have different spelling conventions, even if they use Roman letters. Take French, where au is [o] and ou is [u]; or Dutch, where oe is [u]. Deal with it. Oh, and the advantages? Well, mostly allowing laziness from my part: waapuro spelling resembles kana spelling more closely, and flows therefore more naturally from my fingers. Other than that I can only think that a word like 同音, which is the douon in the title, meaning ‘similar sound’, would look even sillier in an ‘easier’ to grasp transliteration. Simply transcribing the o sounds in 同音 as o would result in: dooon. Doesn't that look even weirder? ⇧
2. A similar example to illustrate the potential of Japanese in this regard is from the blogger Ayumi on Lexiophiles: 貴社の記者が汽車で帰社した。 Kisha no kisha ga kisha de kisha shita. ‘The reporter of your company returned (to the company) by train’ http://www.lexiophiles.com/english/kaeru-ga-kaeru-a-frog-is-going-home ⇧
3. I often have heard the rumor that even during speech Japanese would write a character in the air or on their hand to indicate which word they meant to convey, but I suspect that that is largely a myth (excluding the time that someone simply wants to indicate how a word, or more likely a name, is spelled). ⇧
4. An explanation of the process of adapting Chinese words to Japanese can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary#Phonetic_correspondences_between_Modern_Chinese_and_On.27yomi ⇧