Sunday, September 17, 2017

The first homophones

Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings.

If you think about it, it's really weird that homophones became a thing in the first place!

Yes, I know, homophones tend to enter the language from different origins.  For example, "sight" comes from Old English, and "site" comes from Latin.

But someone at some point in human history was the first person to attempt to use a homophone, and at some point (may or may not have been the first attempt) the notion stuck.

It's so weird to me that the notion stuck!  If you imagine a world where there's no such thing as a homophone, it seems like homophones would be a dealbreaker - think of the confusion if words suddenly started meaning multiple unrelated things depending on context, in a universe where words have only ever had one meaning!

But for some reason it stuck. No one said "Dude, you can't call it a "site" - that sounds exactly like "sight" and everyone will get confused! We already have perfectly good words like "place" or "location". Use one of those."   (Or they did say this and went unheeded.)  And then, as time passed, even more homophones got added. (Including, in this specific example, the word "cite".)

If it hadn't already happened, no one would ever believe that something like that could happen.

3 comments:

laura k said...

Let me ask you this... would it be different if the society didn't care about spelling? Because the idea of spelling words "correctly" is only a few hundred years old. Or maybe it doesn't matter at all, because homophones are about how a word sounds?

impudent strumpet said...

I was thinking about homophones specifically because for so much of human history the vast majority of people haven't had access to written language. For all I know, homophones might even have evolved before written language. (I have no idea if anyone has figured this out - it would be hard to find evidence of the specifics of language that predate written language!)

But now that I think about spelling, it's also kind of weird that homographs happened. When only a very small subset of people had access to written language (and, in many cases in the European context, most of them fell under the authority of the church) it seems like it would be much easier to standardize. Like the overseer of the transcribing monks would go "Brother Joseph, you can't use the spelling B-O-W to mean the front of the ship. Brother Peter is already using it to mean the thing you shoot arrows out of."

laura k said...

True!