Comment by hnfong

I don’t recall specific examples, but as of today, there are quite a lot of Cantonese “words” that don’t have a commonly accepted corresponding character. There’s an unofficial list of word-pronunciation-character mappings, probably this list (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W8Ca3U0YfN-LtZxT1otV...). Some of the character mappings have historical precedent, but a few are probably just adopted in the way I mentioned. It’s quite fascinating even to me (as a native speaker) that some common spoken words have absolutely no standard (or even non standard) way to write down as text.

The unihan database records pronunciations as well but I don’t think anyone takes it seriously. I’m not aware of any software that “prescribes” specific meaning or pronunciations to characters, so basically if you want you can pick a character and assign it a meaning and convince everyone else to use it. For languages that don’t have a fully standardized writing system , it’s something you can do and people have done it. (There’s also a bunch of people trying to convince people to not use the defacto standardized characters in favor of archaic ones that they claim are more “authentic”… but that’s a story for another day