Why are there so many different words with the same pronunciation in Japanese?

Question

Why does Japanese have so many words with different meanings which have the same pronunciation? For example, there are at least 80 different words which are pronounced "ko" , at least 45 for "ka", at least 48 for "kyū" and so on. I know that probably most languages have several different meanings for the same pronunciation (for example in Spanish we say "tomar" for "to drink" and "to get" which aren't even remotely related) or in English they use "to play" for playing an instrument or playing a game (which are very different actions in my opinion, and in Spanish we use 2 different words, namely "tocar" for an instrument and "jugar" for a game), but in Japanese this is taken to a next level. Is there any particular historic reason or some other kind of reason for this?

Answer 1

It is because of the influx of Chinese language words. In the original Chinese, these words with similar consonant+vowel pronunciations were distinguished by "tones" superimposed on those pronunciations. However, those tones were dropped as the words were imported into Japanese (or dropped as they entered Korean and then came to Japan).

In Japanese those imported words are called [漢語]{かんご}. The native Japanese (including words which may have been introduced from native Korean) are called [大和]{やまと}ことば.

You will notice that Yamato kotoba are not easily confused with each other as that family of closely related non-tonal native languages which eventually became today's Yamato kotaba just used more syllables to disambiguate when necessary.

A related fact is that written language, which by nature includes more higher level concepts, which historically are associated with 漢語, tends to be difficult to read without the use of kanji due to their ambiguity when represented only by phonemes. In Korea, which has dropped Kanji in favor of a purely phonetic writing system, reading texts densely packed with 漢語(*) is somewhat difficult, and there is always some talk about re-introducing Kanji.

(* or whatever 漢語 are called in Korean).

Answer 2

You are talking about Kanji, aren't you? Yes there are "子", "来", "小", "湖",etc. They share the same pronunciation "ko." The number of Japanese dairy Kanji is 2136. The number of Japanese pronunciatons are mainly more than fifty.(Precisely more than 100,000.) 50 to 2136 is the reason that there are so many words sharing the same pronunciation.

These Kanji(s) are ideographic characters. Even they share the same pronumciations, each of them has its own meaning.

English word "play" consists of four phonogram words "p", "l", "a" and "y."

Japanese word "子供{こども}" consits of "子{こ}" and "供{ども}=people obey their parents," and means children (of the family). The pronunciation "kodomo こども" is unique. So each Kanji shares the same pronunciations, but Japanese word consisting of several Kanjis has almost unique pronunciation.

Hope this helps.