Homonyms

[SSH]

OK, this is the answer I was looking for: its a matter of entering into common usage (heh, now define "common"). I realise that at points it did sound like a debating contest but I was also looking for some information, too.

SO, shall we move on to a less contentious subject like religion or healthcare?

[Questionable]

SO, shall we move on to a less contentious subject like religion or healthcare?

Not yet. I think it's important to understand that (written) English is not a constructed language. It's a homogenization of many other languages (it's why English dictionaries state the origin of words) and spoken English. As such, the "rules" are not clearly defined as some like to pretend they are.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/punctuation.html
Lewis Thomas has an essay dealing with the farce that is the governing rules of punctuation. Just as the laws of punctuation are fluid, so is almost every part of the English language. What we've done with our language is come up with reason for certain things existing AFTER they came into existence. To pretend like the English language is Black and White is stupid... it doesn't even HAVE black and white, it's all just shades of gray.

It's also important to be aware that "English" isn't a unified language, as well. British English, Australian English, Canadian English and American English (and etc.) are tightly related but all have their own unique philosophies (even when ignoring dialect and local words.) Any rules that and of you point out about the English language are suggestive at best because there is no ubiquity. We're not talking about Hangul or Esperanto. We're talking about (arguably) the most fractured and f****d up language on the face of the Earth.

So honestly, I think you're ALL right. I've seen truth from every individual post here... that's the great thing about the English language, at the end of the day, if you dig deep enough, nobody is wrong (and if they are: consider it slang.)

[Andail]

Questionable; what you're saying is neither new, nor very isolated to English, nor very relevant to our current discourse...

All languages are mixtures of various other languages, due to borrowing, migration, politics, fashion trends etc. English words may be especially easy to trace back, and break up into German, French and Latin roots etc - but all languages have dictionaries that explain the etymology of its words, and these words can come from all over the world, it's the same with any modern language! Swedish to mention one has had three major influxes of loan words (german industrial/trade words from the Hansa days, French fashion/beauty/court words from the 1700 hundreds and English ever since the early 1900), and these groups of words make up a considerable portion of our modern dictionary.

And the fact that there shouldn't be "rules" to govern how we speak has little to do with the properties of English per see, and more with how modern linguists treat language change.
There used to be a much stronger prescriptive movement, that more or less denied that languages change over time. Now most linguists describe what they see instead, and accept that a language is something dynamic and vibrant.

This doesn't mean that everything is ok! No, we can't all be right! Not because it says so in old dusty tomes, but because there must be some sort of agreement in order for proper communication to take place.

All in all, the anglocentrism in your post is quite astonishing.

[Questionable]

Andail:

The fact of the matter is that the rules are not what they once were and will not continue to be what they currently are. You made the point that SSH believed an adjective was something contrary to the definition that the majority was aware of (myself included) and yet you discussed the possibility that in the future his word could be considered an adjective. Also considering that SSH pointed out that our understood definition of an adjective is flawed, there is another layer to adjectives (archaic as it might be.) Based on these admissions you agree that language is not static, that it is constantly evolving. Now, I agree that I can't genuinely claim that we can "all be right," that is true (forgive me for living in my head where everything is drenched in rainbows and unicorns =P ) I can claim, however, that stretching grammar like SSH has done is all right because that's why linguists accept that language is. in fact, dynamic: people simplify, expand and explore and as a result language is ever changing. SSH is part of a process, not a problem. The point that I was trying to make, but failed to explicitly state, is that you can easily say that SSH has an incorrect belief of what the accepted usage of an adjective is, however, by your own admission there is the potential that in the future his usage could be considered correct (maybe even proper) and for all we know perhaps it was the case in the past. Additionally, the dusty old tome makes the point that many of the accepted rules are meaningless and in some cases confuse the content of a communication in which case they are obstructive and should be ignored, even if it means that it breaks from what is accepted.

As a side note, it is difficult for me to not Anglo-centric; The United States is essentially culture locked. Mexico (the most accessible "other" culture) is a half of week away, Canada is approximately the same distance and for all practical purposes is culturally identical. I have extremely limited exposure to other cultures and I don't feel comfortable commenting on other cultures when I lack real-world experience with them. Europe is great in many ways, one of which is the radically unique cultures in relatively close proximity. Not being exposed to other cultures is probably more difficult than being exposed. There is a saying: when in doubt, go with what you know and ultimately (and probably unfortunately) the Anglicized world is all I know. =' [   Keep in mind that I did specify languages that i am familiar with that ARE NOT constructions of cultural assimilation: Hangul is the written Korean language, the creation of which was commissioned by a former Korean King to bring Unity to his Country and to differentiate it culturally from China and other Asian countries; and, Esperanto, constructed with the ideal of becoming a universal language, it DOES have static rules and a set of standards in order to facilitate pan-cultural communication, something other languages like English are not necessarily built for.

To reiterate my point: If spelling the word "Armor" as "Armour" is incorrect today but correct tomorrow, is it proper to have called it incorrect previously? Also, when something IS dynamic it is very difficult to ascribe value to "rules" that change apparently on a whim, an illustration of different rules can be observed by examining British-English versus American English. Plurals, verbs, compliments, titles, proper nouns, prepositions, dating and tenses are all treated differently between British English and American English, and not meaning to ignore the lexicographic rules such as the aforementioned "armor" versus "armour," but I find this information sufficient enough to dispute honestly claiming that anybody is wrong! At the end of the day though, the important thing isn't adherence to rules it is coherence of content and while it is true that standards help establish coherence they can never guarantee it and (as mentioned before) can often obstruct it.

All in all, your litigiousness is astonishing.

[Gilbert]

People. Aren't we supposed to discuss about words/phrases/whatever that sound similar or something here? I think if you still want to continue on arguing about something else that lead to no definitive answer after debating for centuries, either change the topic or give this thread a split.

[Andail]

True. Let's discuss words that sound alike instead.

stare/stair

discuss!

[NsMn]

hare/hair

...yeah, I kinda stole there.

[Nikolas]

mair/mare?  (I actually looked them up and they both exist, while I didn't have a clue and they do seem to sound the same...)

[IndieBoy]

Watt/WHAT?

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Discuss

or

Discus?

[Questionable]

Pi / Muffin

[Snarky]

I can think of a few homophones between English and Norwegian:

cock/kokk (cook)
sleep/slip (polish)
fin/finn (find)
be/bi (by - uncommon/archaic)
use/jus (juice)
paw/på (on)
...

A lot of sounds are subtly different between the two languages, so the homophony may not be 100% exact, but in these cases the correspondence is close enough that I don't think a native speaker would notice anything wrong with the pronunciation if not specifically listening for it. If you relax it further, it gets a lot easier:

knock/nok (enough)
lot/lått (song - dialect)
sleek/slik (such, thus)
soot/sutt (suckle, suck)
nut/nødt (necessary, required)
...

Another phenomenon that might be relevant is "false friends", where two words in two different languages look similar enough that you assume they mean the same thing, but actually have different meanings.

[Tuomas]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg5_mlQOsUQ it's shit but it's what we're talking about.

[paolo]

Much of this may have been said already, but here goes anyway.

When you combine two nouns to make a compound noun (as in "bow tie"), the first noun is still a noun, even though it modifies the second noun. It's called a modifier when it's used like this. In English, *any* noun can be used in this way ("weather forecaster", "computer keyboard") and it is even possible to form strings of nouns, as newspaper headline writers (there's an example right there) are fond of doing: (eg, "LONDON JEWEL HEIST SUSPECT ARRESTED"). That would make every noun an adjective as well, which is just not the case.

Some grammarians require that inflected forms must exist for a word to be an adjective (so "red" is an adjective because the inflected forms "redder" and "reddest" exist, but "land", as in "land animal", is not) but this does not apply to all true adjectives (eg, "alive" in the sense of "living").

Accents where are* is not pronounced except before a vowel or at the end of a word when the following word begins with a vowel are called non-rhotic accents, while those where it is are rhotic. Do kids in regions were the accent is rhotic get taught not to pronounce the letter are* before a consonant? No, of course not, because kids learn to speak before they learn to read, so they already know when to pronounce an are* in a spoken word and when not to. I would think they have no difficulty with understanding why there are silent are*s in some written words and ones that are pronounced in others, because all are*s before consonants will be preceded by a vowel ("or", "ar", etc) and when kids learn to read they are taught that these combinations are pronounced in the same way as "aw", "ah", etc, respectively.

It's debatable whether translingual homophones exist because, while the same phonemes may exist in two languages, they may not be phonetically identical. For example, French "lit" ("bed") and Italian "li" ("them") are phonemically identical (/li/) but may be pronounced slightly differently by French and Italian native speakers. If you are only after a phonemic match, then you can probably come up with dozens for any given pair of languages that use a similar set of phonemes.

EDIT: Modify my posting for txt-style spelling, would you? Grrr! Those "are*s" above refer to the plural of the eighteenth letter of the alphabet

[Snarky]

It's debatable whether translingual homophones exist because, while the same phonemes may exist in two languages, they may not be phonetically identical. For example, French "lit" ("bed") and Italian "li" ("them") are phonemically identical (/li/) but may be pronounced slightly differently by French and Italian native speakers. If you are only after a phonemic match, then you can probably come up with dozens for any given pair of languages that use a similar set of phonemes.

But this is true even within the same language. Different speakers will pronounce phonemically identical words differently (and of course, even the same speaker will not always pronounce the same word exactly the same way). And some words are homophones in some dialects but not in others, e.g. famously pen/pin in some American dialects, or for some speakers but not others, e.g. while/wile depending on whether you pronounce the H in while ("hwile") or not. (This also applies to the previously mentioned what/Watt.)

Maybe the standard should be whether someone speaking Italian + French with an Italian accent (or French + Italian with a French accent) would pronounce the two words the same.

[Dualnames]

It's debatable whether translingual homophones exist because, while the same phonemes may exist in two languages, they may not be phonetically identical. For example, French "lit" ("bed") and Italian "li" ("them") are phonemically identical (/li/) but may be pronounced slightly differently by French and Italian native speakers. If you are only after a phonemic match, then you can probably come up with dozens for any given pair of languages that use a similar set of phonemes.

But this is true even within the same language. Different speakers will pronounce phonemically identical words differently (and of course, even the same speaker will not always pronounce the same word exactly the same way). And some words are homophones in some dialects but not in others, e.g. famously pen/pin in some American dialects, or for some speakers but not others, e.g. while/wile depending on whether you pronounce the H in while ("hwile") or not. (This also applies to the previously mentioned what/Watt.)

Maybe the standard should be whether someone speaking Italian + French with an Italian accent (or French + Italian with a French accent) would pronounce the two words the same.

Quiet Riot was named because everyone heard Quiet Right wrong, due to the English accent.

[Questionable]

I thought it was:  Quite Right -> Quiet Riot

[William]

sorry for double posting

[William]

...like sea/see