As someone who speaks Cantonese, it’s more that Cantonese has six tones, rather than similar-sounding vowels. People who don’t know how tonal languages work are prone to fucking it up, cuz we have relatively quite a lot amongst the more popular languages. Plus the large number of homophones cuz of the monosyllablism of Chinese languages where each syllable has its own character, you get a lot of context-dependent words. Also makes for some puns, but yeah.
I think I get it, Cantonese speakers use the tonal sounds and people understand it from the tonal sounds for the most part. Whereas even though the words are completely contextual for English, no one would really know that they were changing the tone?
As someone who speaks Cantonese, it’s more that Cantonese has six tones, rather than similar-sounding vowels. People who don’t know how tonal languages work are prone to fucking it up, cuz we have relatively quite a lot amongst the more popular languages. Plus the large number of homophones cuz of the monosyllablism of Chinese languages where each syllable has its own character, you get a lot of context-dependent words. Also makes for some puns, but yeah.
I think I get it, Cantonese speakers use the tonal sounds and people understand it from the tonal sounds for the most part. Whereas even though the words are completely contextual for English, no one would really know that they were changing the tone?