I looked to see if this was asked before and saw nothing. So here goes.
I’m actually not normally freaked out by the number of homophones in Japanese. I get how context clears it up normally. And word choice can also smooth it over.
But how the heck do you clear up 市営 vs 私営 ?
Literally one hundred percent of cases will leave this ambiguous, since the only context I use either is to clear up which one of those two a thing (usually transportation related) is.
Example:
The buses here are run privately, not by the city.
Wouldn’t that sentence be self-defeating and ambiguous in Japanese?
Even just “The trains here are private” is pointless because it’s unclear if I mean private, or city (entirely possible in some contexts).
In short, these are the only homophones I’ve seen yet that are always, not sometimes, ambiguous.
So, are there different words you actually use to clear this up?
I know for 私立 and 市立 (both しりつ normally), they can be pronounced わたくしりつ and いちりつ for clarity. I don’t see something similar for these on jisho, but I wonder if it happens. Or maybe they aren’t commonly spoken words, I have no idea.
Agreed that for words with 私, a recent example I heard was 私小説, for clarification you can pronounce it わたくし(しょうせつ), and this probably works for 私営 as well.
dictionary.goo.ne.jp doesn’t mention any いちえい pronunciation though. It however opposes 私営 to 公営, so I’d believe Japanese people would use those two to translate the “ran privately not by the city” you mentioned.
I did think of that for sentences where both are used. It only solves part of the problem though.
There is still the question of ambiguity when using just one. That is, any time you clarify something is しえい when it could be plausibly city or privately owned (which is pretty much any time you mean the city meaning).
I suppose you could just always construct the sentence to use another -営 word to clarify. That, however, still leaves it far clunkier than most homophones (which are much less important than most random people on the internet think. How often are nose and flower going to create confusion? Yet several threads asking how to tell this apart exist in other parts of the internet).
Do you have an actual example of someone using one or the other in a spoken context where you found the usage totally ambiguous where no other context was provided by the speaker or from the current conversation so that the listener knew which word was being used? I’m just curious because I’m not sure how it’s worse than any other homophones one can find with different meanings and equivalent pitch accents.
For example, 読む and 詠む which are both pronounced よむ with the same pitch accent but have differing meanings and you can even construct sentences where spoken in total isolation they would be completely ambiguous:
俳句を詠んでいます。
and
俳句を読んでいます。
I could either be reading or composing a haiku. But I’m not sure anyone would just state either one of these sentences with no other context?
