384 - Homophones

Grammar Girl: For Writers and Language Lovers.

Mignon Fogarty, Inc.

Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2013

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Which English homophones came from polysemy and which came from spelling variation? Try our new iPad game, Grammar Pop. If you like the Grammar Girl podcast, you'll love the game.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Grimmer girl here, everyone knows that English spelling is a mess.
0:06.7	Homophones or words that sound the same but are spelled differently are a particular
0:11.8	source of trouble.
0:13.8	Many people struggle with homophones but for the most part it's just an unfortunate coincidence
0:19.0	that these words sound alike.
0:21.6	Today, guest writer Jonathan Owen is going to help us understand why we have all these
0:26.5	similar pairs of words in English.
0:29.5	There are several pairs of homophones in English that started life as one word.
0:35.1	These words look and sound alike because they have a common origin.
0:39.1	Think of them like identical twins.
0:41.7	One word splits into two early on and it can be difficult to tell them apart unless you
0:46.2	know them really well, like past with an ed and past with a t or complement with an
0:53.4	i and complement with an e.
0:56.3	These words are especially tricky because in many cases the meanings are still similar.
1:01.5	So how did they get this way?
1:03.9	Two reasons.
1:05.4	Polysemi and spelling variation.
1:09.1	Polysemi means the capacity for a word to have more than one meaning.
1:14.2	Many words are polysemas.
1:15.6	For example, Merriam Webster's collegiate dictionary records 36 main senses for the verb
1:22.0	set, SET, including both transitive and intransitive uses.
1:28.2	Polysemi is a natural feature of language and it's not something to worry about because
	...

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