Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Homonyms, homographs, homophones, oh my!

While there is some disagreement about the distinction between homonyms and homophones, no bar fights have ever broken out over homographs, that is to say, words that are spelled alike but mean different things. 

Punch, for instance. Whether thrown or drunk, “punch” is spelled the same way. It is a homograph pair whose two meanings are pronounced the same. Some homographs sound different, as in describing the brevity of sixty seconds as a minute minute, but even with that second feature (usually one more than is needed to begin a dispute), few grammarians, however sad and lonely, raise an objection to the blanket statement that all word pairs with identical spelling and disparate senses qualify as homographs. 

 

Many homographs are also homophones, which are characterized by their sounding alike, as in the two versions of “punch” above. They are spelled alike and they sound alike, but they mean different things, so they fit the requirements of both categories. "Minute" and "minute" as described in the previous paragraph qualify as a homograph pairs but not as homophones. 

 

I made allusion to some grammar violence in the first paragraph, and homonyms is where you run into it. Many a lip has been bloodied by pinch-nosed prescriptivists who roar into conflict if nastily provoked over the win currently enjoyed by the modern preference of describing both homographs and homophones as homonyms. These hidebound grammar thugs point to the -nym suffix as meaning “name” and as such prefer it to refer only to word pairs that are spelled alike but differ in both pronunciation and meaning. 

 

This notion would provide no distinction then from homograph. The thankfully prevailing view is for homonyms to be the umbrella under which both homographs and homophones reside. In the "all dogs are animals but not all animals are dogs" sort criteria, homonym as a parent category above homograph and homophone serves as a good organizing principle for these grammar terms.




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