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A comment on The long, tortuous and fascinating process of creating a Chinese font. Parent comment

Re:The long, tortuous and fascinating process of creating a ... by raverbashing on Sunday April 15, 2018 @03:15PM (#16844349)
> Homophony is extremely common in Mandarin; eliminating characters would make reading very very difficult.

Well, it would be as difficult as understanding a spoken phrase that uses such homophones. (NLP people would probably hate that though :) )

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Re:The long, tortuous and fascinating process of creating a ... by intopieces on Monday April 16, 2018 @06:53PM (#16853654)
Yes, it is difficult to understand a spoken phrase. That's why speakers rely on shared context: physical place, relationship between speaker and listener, previous interaction/s between speaker and listener.... none of which is present in a book or newspaper article that's being plucked out of the context-ether.
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