How can it be the case that tooth and leaf are pronounced the same?

6 comments

1. >there are now two words that sound the same but mean different things

   It’s like “bark” from a tree and “bark” the sound or “spring” the season and “spring” the object, etc. Japanese just has a lot more of those than English. There are literally dozens of words pronounced [しょう](https://jisho.org/search/%E3%81%97%E3%82%87%E3%81%86) and [こう](https://jisho.org/search/%E3%81%93%E3%81%86) …

2. >sound the same but mean different things

   do you *mean* something like:
   – mean *v.* to have in the mind as a purpose
   – mean *adj.* of poor, shabby, or inferior quality or status
   – mean *adj.* occupying a middle position
   – mean *n.* something intervening or intermediate

   There’s nothing special going on here. At least the kanji is different, which makes it easier when you combine them with context.

   edit
   source: [Merriam Webster: *mean*](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mean)

3. There are waaaay more than that. But think about English for a second. How many different definitions does the word “fit” have, for example? Same sound but..

   To fit something in a box,
   To be physically fit and healthy,
   To have a fit (seizure)

   But you don’t even think about it because of the context of the sentence. Same as if someone said “it’s autumn, all the leaves are falling off the trees” you know they wouldn’t be talking about teeth cos that’d be ridiculous

4. > kanji sounds

   Kanji. Don’t. Have. Any. “Sounds”. Words do. Stop perceiving a writing system as some mysterious “intangible essence” of a language.

5. It’s a homophone. Most languages have them. Japanese has a ton.

   But yes, your fundamental understanding is off, and I’m not really sure how to break it down in a way that changes that.

   Kanji and Kana are unrelated in use (*Use*, I know the history), and both are minimally related to words itself. Just how an illiterate person can still speak English. Japanese has its 50-odd base sounds, and a few dozen more complex ones, that make up the language. They don’t even need to be written to exist.

   Kana simply maps directly to sounds–***generally speaking***, one Hiragana character is one sound. *And you could spell the entire language like that.*

   Kanji maps directly to words, with minimal hint to what the sounds are outside of you already knowing it.

   You could certainly tell someone how a Kanji is pronounced by spelling it out with Hiragana, but at the end of the day they are completely different systems serving different purposes. There is no need to differentiate them.

   歯 (Tooth) and 葉 (leaf) both have Kanji, and they are both pronounced with the sound は

6. Since people have explained that homophones exist in every single language, I’ll point out a couple other things.

   >hiragana essentially operates as a way of breaking down more complex kanji sounds into individual, phonetic, symbols, whilst also including a set of it’s own words that aren’t necessarily reflected in kanji

   Don’t look at it that way. Kana is a phonetic script, that’s all. It’s used to represent the spoken language as a bunch of phonetics because looking at a picture of a tree (木) doesn’t tell you that it’s read as ki (き). There is absolutely no correlation between kanji and kana in terms of sound. Now it’s easier to understand that tooth and leaf both just happened to be pronounced the same way.

   >Is it the case that the Kanji 葉 (Ha) has a subtle upwards inflection which differentiates it from the Hiragana は (Ha)?

   Nope, hiragana inherently don’t have any inflection, that depends on the word/sentence that the _kanji_ is present in. Tooth (歯) and leaf (葉) have different inflections, but there are plenty of homophones where the inflection is the same and you need to figure out the word by context.