Note: these words are not simply homophones, but have the same etymology. They’re basically the same word, with different shades of meaning depending on context, and Chinese characters applied for the right nuance.
Linguistically they are not homophones. Like you said they are the same word “あう”. Kanji helps split different meanings of the same word. Just like in English, meet has multiple shades of meaning (to meet a friend, meet a target, etc). Homophones are two different words with different meaning and origin which happen to sound the same by chance. (かみ = hair, paper )
Not Japanese, but a Chinese user. I think the difference might be on the Chinese side? My hypothesis is these situations are many-to-many mappings of Chinese words and Japanese native words, where one language might have more specific words for some situations. I would imagine 生 being a reversed example (having many Kun readings), where English and Japanese has more specific words for each definition, but Chinese clumps 20+ definitions into one character. Chinese dictionary: 會: People meeting, converging, among other meanings like understanding, conference, etc. (e.g. 會面/會合 meet/see each other/congregate. I think this is where the two might have planned to meet each other, and not bumped into each other.) 逢: come upon e.g. (逢兇化吉: turning bad luck into good luck, but literally meaning "when coming upon bad luck, turn into good luck")
Linguistically they are not homophones. Like they are the same word “あう”. Kanji helps split different meanings of the same word. Just like in English, meet has multiple shades of meaning (to meet a friend, meet a target, or when two things meet, they come into cotact etc). Homophones are two different words with different meaning and origin which happen to sound the same by chance. (かみ = hair, paper )
For example, connect in Arabic can mean connecting USB to computer or reaching a destination. If we used kanji, we'd give this one word two different Chinese characters.
@@ムャlechat This is actually an interesting topic. Most scholars will agree that in Ancient/Middle Japanese, there existed a 7-vowel system instead of 5. The evidence is strong. In pre Kana era, When Japanese started to write japanese, they used Chinese characters to write the sounds of Japanese, it is called 万葉仮名 Manyōkana. In recent decades, it was discovered that in Manyokana, they used two different sets of chinese characters to write the modern sound of み (mi), so if the mi sounded exactly the same in ancient/modern japanese, they why would the ancient Japanese wrote using two sets of characters (and the use of consistent, for example for 髪 kami, they always use set a, hence some people called it kami1 , for 神 they always use set b, (kami2). The only logical explanation is that, the み mi didnt sound the same like today and it had two different sounds (mi1, mi2) which merged to み mi today. Same story with the vowel ‘e’ (えけせてetc). So basically most modern days homophones happen because of sound merge, our phonology simplifies itself from time to time, when sounds simplify or merge, they become homophones.
