I love a bit of word play and today I’ve played with homophones
I can’t help but feel that a group of engineers must have got together and felt the need to create a set of labelled boxes to sort out all of the peculiarities associated with words of the english language. What am I talking about? It’s the old homonym, homophone, heteronym, polyseme and capitonym boxes. So what does each box hold?
Homonym
- Words that share the same spelling and pronunciation but have different meanings.
- left (opposite of right or depart the building)
And now the engineers get a bit tricky with a box partly in a box (the homonym box that is)…
Homophone (‘same sound’)
- Same pronunciation, different meaning and regardless of their spelling
- wine (good to drink 🙂 ) and whine (speciality skill set possessed by my children)
- to, too, two
Another box partly in the homonym box…
Homograph (‘same writing’)
- Words that share the same spelling, with a different meaning and regardless of how they are pronounced
- bat (animal or sports equipment)
And this type sits squarely inside the Homograph box…
Hetronym (‘different name’)
- Same spelling, different pronunciation and meaning
- bow BAU – front of ship and BOH weapon of choice for Robin hood and his merry men
- desert dihZURT– don’t leave just yet, we’re nearly at the end and DEZert– arid region
I think they just wanted to see if they could partly place another box inside the Homograph, introducing the…
Polyseme (‘many signs/words’)
- Same spelling and distinct but related meaning
- mouth (used to eat chocolate or the opening of a cave or river)
I think they came up with this one after a few glasses of whine… I mean wine…
Capitonym
- Same spelling but different meaning when capitalised
- march (uniform walk) and March (third month in year)
- earth (soil) and Earth (our home)
I never heard of the term captionym, but it makes sense. One of the things I like about English is that it has adopted words from so many languages.
To be fair… IF you’re pronouncing them correctly (and I’m NOT saying I ever do)… wine shouldn’t be pronounced the same as whine. 🙂
Meanwhile… things like the mouth of a river seem (polyseme??? 😉 ) to have origins in metaphor to me. So, not so much that we are talking about different meanings for “mouth” but rather applying human/animal characteristics to a river and saying, essentially, IF it had a mouth like us, that would be where it was.
Interesting, or perhaps not, that we only talk about the mouth of the river… when do you ever hear anyone talking about the river’s butt? 🙂
Polysemy seems to strike a bit of controversy on the web b/c it is very subjective. You’re right about the metaphor, but you could argue it’s a metaphor and a polyseme. Perhaps wood would be a better example of a polysemy (no metaphor)
– a piece of a tree
– a geographical area with many trees
English is not really English because of its root word. Here’s what my friend and I have a good laugh due to our limitations…. If I am an invalid, am I invalid?
Heh, heh… love the language. So glad it’s my first language, as it would do my head in with all the ‘exceptions’ to the rule
I knew homonym and homophone, but not the others. Now, the trick will be whether I can remember them!
To be honest, it did my head in trying to understand the differences and similarities. I still can’t remember them all!