Anyone who's had any exposure to written Chinese has noticed how many characters have exactly the same pronunciation, or even heard the commonly thrown-around factoid that Chinese is full of homophones. Whether or not modern spoken Chinese languages are actually so unusually full of homophones is debatable, but it's certainly true that a huge number of Chinese characters are homophonic. For instance, the MDGB dictionary lists over a hundred characters with the pronunciation yì [î]. So why on earth is Chinese writing carrying so much information that has nothing to do with encoding the spoken language? It turns out that it can all be traced back to factors emerging from the history and nature of the writing system itself.
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| Evolution of a pictographic character meaning "sun" |
There's an interesting conception I encounter a lot among speakers of Mandarin - that historic writers like Laozi and Li Bai pronounced their characters identically to modern Beijing Mandarin, with all other dialects and variations descended from this timeless, standard pronunciation. Of course, this is patently false.