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An interest in puns has led me to start reading the literature on homophones. Interestingly, in appears that in the scientific literature "homophone" and "homograph" mean the same thing, which explains why there are so many papers about mispronouncing homophones.
Here's a representative quote:
"...reports a failure to use context in reading, by people with autism, such that homophones are mispronounced (eg: 'there was a tear in her eye' might be misread so as to sound like 'there was a tear in her dress").'
Sticklers will note that "tear in her eye" actually does involve a homophone (tier), but I don't think that's what the authors meant.
Readers of this blog know that I'm not a prescriptivist -- that is, I believe words mean whatever most speakers of a language think the words mean. So I'm not going to claim that these authors are misusing the word, since there seem to be so many of them. That said, it would be convenient to have a term for two words that have the same pronunciation which is distinct from the term for two words with distinct pronunciations but are written in the same way.
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Comments
On the other hand
October 21, 2009 by levbor, 4 weeks 3 days ago
Comment id: 45637
people should talk in a more or less logical way. Everyone involved with languages knows that "homophone" means "one sound".
multiphonic homographs?
October 19, 2009 by Anonymous, 4 weeks 4 days ago
Comment id: 45598
Interesting that people who study language do no express themselves more clearly. An attorney friend of mine claims that each word in legalese has one and only one definition. Maybe you should bring this up at one of the conferences and propose a new word for same-spelling-multiple-pronunciation words. (Multiphonic homograph may work, but is pretty clumsy).
As to why they exist, I think the blame goes to whoever standardized the English language spelling. I don't think they exist at all in Cherokee, for example.
Cherokee?
October 23, 2009 by coglanglab, 4 weeks 1 day ago
Comment id: 45711
Unlikely. Nearly every word has multitudes of meanings. That seems to be a feature of the human mind that we can't really get around. Another interesting feature is that much of the time we don't even notice the ambiguity.
more bad communication
October 24, 2009 by Anonymous, 3 weeks 6 days ago
Comment id: 45749
What I was attempting to refer to was same-spelling-different-sound words. What I read about Cherokee is that it was made with a different spelling for each sound (even some which do not normally exist in Cherokee language) and everything is spelled phonetically. So anything written can only be pronounced only one way:
http://www.native-languages.org/cherokee_names.htm
I agree with you that same-sound-different-meaning words seem to be pretty much universal. Whether this came from the nature of our minds or the way that speech evolved is beyond me. (If there is a difference).
Time flies
October 19, 2009 by Anonymous, 4 weeks 5 days ago
Comment id: 45584
Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana.
Re: Time flies
October 19, 2009 by Anonymous, 4 weeks 4 days ago
Comment id: 45597
Fruit flies also seem to like my garbage.