Readers of technical and academic texts often have to clarify terms for the listener to avoid ambiguity, and most "hanja" are only used when necessary to clear confusion. As can be seen in the example below, the "hanja" in an otherwise mostly native vocabulary song stand out from the "hangul" text, thus appearing almost like bolded and enlarged text. This was further amplified in older texts, when "hangul" blocks were sometimes written smaller than the surrounding "hanja." Very few "hanja" are used in modern Korean writing, but are occasionally seen in academic and technical texts and formal publications, such as newspapers, where the rare "hanja" is used as a shorthand in newspaper headlines, especially if the native Korean equivalent is a longer word, or more importantly, to disambiguate the meaning of a word. Sino-Korean words make up over 70% of the Korean language, although only a third of them are in common usage, but that proportion increases in formal and highbrow publications. A native Korean syllable may have up to 1,300 possible combinations compared to the Sino-Korean inventory of 400. Although Middle Korean developed tones that may have facilitated differentiation of words, this development was lost in the transition to modern Korean, making many words homophones of each other. In Cantonese, whose pronunciation of the characters is similar to the Sino-Korean pronunciation due to its conservative phonology and the ancient age in which these words entered Korean, has several words pronounced : 'new', 'body', 'deity', 'difficult' or 'spicy', 'large clam', 'kidney' and 'to lament.' Although even in Cantonese , and are true homophones with the pronunciation of with the high tone, each of the other examples are pronounced with a unique tone that distiniguish them from the first three and each other: , and . In Korean, the "hanja-eo" reading of all these characters is and in "hangul" spelling all share and no tone to distinguish them. By the mid-1990s, when even the most conservative newspapers stopped publishing in "hanja-honyong", with most ceasing in the 1980s, and switched to a generally all-"hangul" format, the use of characters to clarify the meaning of a word, "'hanja" disambiguation', is still common, in part due to complaints from older subscribers that were educated in the mixed script and were used to using "hanja" glosses.