I am not learning pinyin to learn Chinese, I already know Chinese, and I know how imprecise it can be because when conversing in Chinese we often have to use one word or sentence to make the otherone clear. But in the above context, of which we are talking about, we are referring to a single character.
It sounds like you must know some Chinese, then you must know that a single Chinese character almost always has many different meanings, and shades of meaning. This is why so many Chinese words are made up of two characters (compounded), and sometimes even three, four, and five characters (especially when denoting medicine and medical terms). I am talking about the individual Chinese characters, not the phonetic transliteration of those characters. Chinese scientists and writers today very often have to use some English words when they write an article in Chinese today because the Chinese language does not have a character that can be used to describe what they are referring to: therefore they can only use the English.
This is one of the major problems with a character language, i.e., it's limitation. While in English we constantly create new words, you cannot do that with Chinese characters: the amount of characters are set. They do not create new Chinese characters as we can and do in English. The romanized German language especially consists of extremely long words, especially in science, because they just keep tacking on new suffixes and prefixes and adding on related words to the original to make it more and more precise. Even when I say my own name in Chinese, as is usual when speaking Chinese, I have to say "Wo xing Tang - Tang dia de Tang" (My name is Tang, as in Tang Dynasty Tang).
But aside from this spoken confusion of the Chinese language, as in any language in the world, the words - or individual characters in Chinese - change there meaning over time. This is true of any language and this is what we are talking about.
In martial arts they retain the ancient meanings of the original Chinese characters. "Qi" today means 1)"fresh air" or 2) "spirit, morale". And then in Chinese by compounding two characters the meaning gets more precise: "qihou" means "climate," "tianqi" means "weather," "qili" means "energy or strength," etc. I am only using the pinyin here because I don't know if the Chinese characters will post or not, but the meaning is the same. The same character for "qi" used today in modern times no longer has that same meaning as the same character was used by Lao Tzu.
There are about 80,000 Chinese characters, usually only about 30,000 listed in the average Chinese dictionary, 5,000 to be considered fluent, and 3,000 to easily be able to read a Chinese newspaper. No new characters are ever created: only combined. Compare that to the 225,000 words listed in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and over 800,000 words in an average German dictionary.
