Why do so many kanji compounds use two characters meaning the same thing?
@You refer to compounds such as S burden, 畆 skin, love, ] desire, | fear or printing. Chinese is loaded with homophones, and even when tonal distinctions are allowed for there remains plenty of room for confusion. Doubling up a term helps distinguish these homophones. Some say there is an aesthetic reason behind this tendency as well. Taking S as an example, the first character originally meant to carry on the back, and the second to carry on the shoulder. Combining the two creates a nice semantic balance, or so proponents of this view would have us believe.
