Questions tagged [homonymy]

a relation between a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings

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What does linguistics call sets of words with the same spelling, different (but perhaps related) meaning, and different emphasized syllables?

In my idiolect, the word "defense", with the emphasis on the first syllable means "the role of defending". With the emphasis on the second syllable, it means "the act of ...
Scott Deerwester's user avatar
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Does a coherent sentence which is a cross language homophone exist?

Consider a basic example of the French word oui, and the English word we. Phonetically these words are pronounced identically (okay some French speakers may put emphasis on the oo sound in oui, but ...
Craig's user avatar
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Where did the homonyms which retain meaning among languages come from?

Some languages have homonyms which are semantically equivalent to homonyms in other languages. A few examples of this phenomenon: "Morgen" in German and "утре" in Bulgarian can mean either "tomorrow"...
user5455's user avatar
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Hungarian homographs

I've been living in Hungary for a year now and I've been slowly learning the language, so naturally a question arouse: are there any homographs in Hungarian? When I'm talking about homograph I mean a ...
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Are there terms for homophones that vary by syllabic emphasis?

Is there a technical term for words that have the same phonemes but are distinguished by syllabic emphasis? E.g., abstract is æb-strækt, but emphasis on the first syllable is a different word from ...
feetwet's user avatar
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Are English homonyms distinguishable by pitch profile?

I was told years ago by a teacher at a Carden School that they teach their students that English homonyms, especially those with diphthongs, can be told apart by the pitch profile of the vowel sound. ...
timquinn's user avatar
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How are meanings of a word ordered in a dictionary?

What base does vocabulary.com use for its hierarchy of meanings of a word? For example see http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/sound. Are top levels (numbered list) all homonyms? What structure do ...
Real Dreams's user avatar
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Does there exist a pair of words with the same parts of speech, same base form, but different inflections?

I will attempt to illustrate my question via example. Let's say we have two verbs which are homonyms of eachother: "fleeber" and "fleeber". The first means "to create a soft ...
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Is there any synchronic difference between homonymy and polysemy?

Is there any synchronic difference between homonymy and polysemy? As a literate English speaker, I can usually tell when words that are pronounced identically have different etymologies thanks ...
James Grossmann's user avatar
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What is a word?

The way I see it, a word could be conceptualized as different sets. I'll list them below. Word as a singleton set: { to jump } Word as a set of all its inflections: { to jump, jumps, jumped, jumping, ...
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Is it possible for two Semitic (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew) words with the same triliteral root to have different origins?

Learning Arabic, I see some examples of triliteral roots from which words with apparently different meanings are derived. Example: ف ط ر (f-ṭ-r) "to break apart or tear": فَطَرَ • (faṭara) (maybe ...
Metamorphic's user avatar
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Is it rare for a language to contain both heterographs and heteronyms?

English has many heterographs: words that are spelled differently but pronounced the same. Examples include there/their/they're, hear/here, red/read, led/lead, etc. English also has heteronyms: words ...
SeanR's user avatar
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Smirnitsky's classification of homonyms

I'm a newbie on this site. I just learned the Smirnitsky's classification of homonyms and to be honest, I haven't quite grasped it yet. Here's the summary of the classification: Full lexical homonyms ...
chubby_dimples's user avatar
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Term for homophones in tonal languages which share phonemes but have different tones?

In English we have several terms, "homonym", "homophone", and "homograph". The first one is disliked by linguists as being too vague though might be best used for words with separate etymologies that ...
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Word Sense Disambiguation for common groups of words

Let's say the dictionary has two definitions for live: Live: I live by the sea. Live: The match was shown live on the sports channel. and also contains the following definition: Live ...
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Is there a term for reading a homonym that means one thing but interpreting it as another?

For example, a friend of mine posted a picture of a book series on Facebook and the start of his caption was "Read all 13!" I initially interpretted this as an imperative sentence ([ɹid] all 13), but ...
Nick Anderegg's user avatar
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How can it be decided whether two grammatical cases should be taken to be just homophonous (i.e. as separate) or actually equal?

I've come across this in multiple grammars: Two grammatical cases (e.g. ergative and instrumental) are said to be "homophonous" - they make use of the (apparently?) same marker and yet, they are ...
maj's user avatar
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Estimate of the number of homographs in english

Am curious as to the number of homographs (sets of word meanings that share a common spelling) that occur in the English language. Also what the current state of the art would be for automatically ...
norlesh's user avatar
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How do homonyms impact English Language Learners' comprehension?

I understand that homonyms are words that sound alike but have different meanings. They may or may not be spelled the same. For example, the word 'fair' is spelled and pronounced the same for three ...
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Homographs non-homophones

Homophones that are not homographs are common in languages like English. This arises because several letters (or diphthongs) can have the same pronunciation. But where do the (less common) homographs ...
Mathieu Bouville's user avatar
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Are homonyms inherently unstable?

I'm certain there's a better way to entitle this question, so maybe someone can edit it. Consider the word the word "we'll". My understanding of the Fill-Feel Merger means "we'll" could end up ...
DBWeinstein's user avatar
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Two languages have the same homonym for two meanings but different phonetics [closed]

If they got it from the protolanguage, then why does it have different phonetics? Is it possible that they were developed separately? 'Mañana' in Spanish – means 'morning' and 'tomorrow' 'Morgen’ in ...
Rudziankoŭ's user avatar
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What are the processes and mechanisms that create homo(graphs/phones/semes)?

I suspect that homographs and homophones may arise as multiple words from different languages are brought into a language, winding up with the same graphemic and/or phonemic representation. The same ...
A. Kvåle's user avatar
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What does one call a similar inflections of a root with different morphological classes as?

In a morphologically rich language, it is quite common that a root might have multiple inflections, each representing a different morphological class. Here multiple inflected word forms of a root ...
Amrith Krishna's user avatar
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Are cold as in cool and cold as in calm seperate words? What is "cool" without context, it can't be a word?

Homonyms are two words that are spelled the same and sound the same but have different meanings. A definition is a statement of the exact meaning of a word, especially in a dictionary. Cool as in ...
Rock Hupperts's user avatar