> Absolutely no since everything about Chinese is not based on pronunciation.
This conflates so much. Hanzi (mostly) isn't pronunciation-based[1], but Hanzi is simply one, and a secondary one at that, representation of the language. The primary representation of the language is the spoken representation, and unless Mandarin speakers spend their time in silence, it's very much pronunciation based.
[1] But it make plenty use of rebuses, where you have a character made up of two characters mashed together into a single character, one part indicating the kind of thing (such as a tree), and another giving a word it sounds like.
> Even the meaning of a word change by the pitch.
No, these are distinct words that have different tone contours. We wouldn't call "bat" and "pat" the same word in English, even though the only difference is that they different voicing, nor would we call "stoop" and "stop" the same word when they differ only in vowel length. The same goes for languages with contrasts in aspiration, ingressive vs egressive consonants, and so on. Tone is no different.
> Just open any Japanese dictionary then you will see that it is a completely broken language if without the expressive power of Kanji (or Chinese characters).
Japanese speakers must have awful trouble speaking with one another in that case.
> No, these are distinct words that have different tone contours. "bat" and "pat" ... "stoop" and "stop" the same word
I don't want to repeat but your examples are not the situation in Chinese speaking system. When you write out the sound of different words, they are literally the same e.g. "stop". The distinction is whether you pronounce it in C major or E or G. Same goes for many southeast asia languages although not an expert on those.
> Japanese speakers must have awful trouble speaking with one another in that case.
In fact large chunk of jokes (either modern of traditional) from Japan is due to different vocabularies share the same prounciation.
Even not a small proportion of detective stories' twist comes from different interpretation of the same prounciation. Like someone say something on the phone but misunderstood by the others, or someone writen down a message before dead in Kana (prounciation) instead of Kanji (meaning). The whole story is just playing with those linguistic hash collisions.
Yeah, I don't speak chinese, but there are many european languages that use accents to change sounds of vowels. In portuguese, the difference between grandmother (avó) and grandfather (avô) is just in how you pronounce the o. I am extremely skeptical that any language that humans speak could be impossible to create a phonetical writing system for. It may need features that the latin alphabet lacks, but it should be possible.
no, this is not correct. you don't need perfect pitch to speak proper chinese, it's about the relative pitch contours. C vs E vs G has nothing to do with it. and native chinese speakers are not conceptualizing it as "pronunciation" + "pitch" as two separate things that exist alongside each other. the pitch is a fundamental part of the pronunciation, not external to it
i dont know japanese but it sounds like your example is just saying that japanese humor has a lot of puns
This conflates so much. Hanzi (mostly) isn't pronunciation-based[1], but Hanzi is simply one, and a secondary one at that, representation of the language. The primary representation of the language is the spoken representation, and unless Mandarin speakers spend their time in silence, it's very much pronunciation based.
[1] But it make plenty use of rebuses, where you have a character made up of two characters mashed together into a single character, one part indicating the kind of thing (such as a tree), and another giving a word it sounds like.
> Even the meaning of a word change by the pitch.
No, these are distinct words that have different tone contours. We wouldn't call "bat" and "pat" the same word in English, even though the only difference is that they different voicing, nor would we call "stoop" and "stop" the same word when they differ only in vowel length. The same goes for languages with contrasts in aspiration, ingressive vs egressive consonants, and so on. Tone is no different.
> Just open any Japanese dictionary then you will see that it is a completely broken language if without the expressive power of Kanji (or Chinese characters).
Japanese speakers must have awful trouble speaking with one another in that case.