A few days ago China celebrated one of many Chinese Valentine’s days: the 20th of May. Why is this a special day in China? Chinese has around 30 to 36 phonemes which is plenty, but Chinese phonotactics dictate that you can only make around 1200 syllables out of them, for instance, see this video. English has more than 8000 possible syllables. Additionally, Chinese (unlike many other languages) uses one syllables per morpheme. This distinguished from languages such as Japanese which have very few syllables, but usually use two or three syllables for one morpheme. Often Chinese avoids any resulting confusion by various means, for instance, by combining at least two morphemes/syllables. Yet you find around 1500 one syllable words in Mandarin. By the pigeonhole principle, we find at least two words which sound the same!

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