The Problem of Audibols with Different Meanings (Lesson 474)

In last pages, the author continuely discussed the audibol, one of the problems with an audibol is that even though it sounds the same, it can have different meanings. For example, there are “too” “to” “two” in English. The three same audibol have three different meanings.

Actually, I think it’s a not a big problem in real communication environment. As we all know, people not only communicate with a individual word, but also the tones, context, even the body language. In fact, even if a person talk with each other in their mother tongue, I guess that’s what happens some words are comfused because the words are some sounds. But the native people just always know the meanings, why? Because they know it through multiple sections, not just a word.

Of course, there is also this problem that same audibols but different meanings in Chinese. Today, let me talk about the topic in chinese. For example, “星星” and “猩猩”, there is the same audibol in chinese – xingxing. These two words also look very similar in appearance. But their meanings are totally different. “星星”is means the star, it could be a star in the sky, the paper star or just a thing like a star sharp. “猩猩”is means a style of animals, like the big monkey. Next, let’s make a specific sentence to see. One day, a couple is walking on the road at night, when the girl look at the sky, she will says, oh, there are so many 星星, how beautiful! On the contrary, The other day, the couple would go to the zoo, and the boy very like the animals, look at “猩猩” in the tree, he would say, how nice is the “猩猩”. In the example above, even if the sounds are same, the shape of the characters are similar, people also use context to express meaning.

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