To be fair, zero is a complicated number

  • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    Sure, but they’re often different enough to to be obvious in context, or similar enough to have a shared etymology.

    Tones came later in Chinese, so when you have 2 homophones with similar meaning and different tones, they’re usually from words that had 2 suffixes, which were later dropped, but the tone of first part remained, 买 and 卖 didn’t end up with the same word by coincidence.