Question for my international friends here, (I'm lookin' at you Sjoerd and KK ) or anyone who has any knowledge.....do other languages do this? Depending on context, we pronounce tear (from the eye) and tear (rip) differently. Though, through, dough, plough, and cough, while spelled similarly are not pronounced similarly. Grasp and wasp, cork and work are in a similar category. So's youth and south, and worm and storm. What about the word seven? Why don't you pronounce the word even the same way, if you're just eliminating the "s?" The english language is a trip! English spelling does not display a one-to-one correspondence with pronunciation, and certainly not with modern pronunciation. Google tells me that these kinds of words are spelled with the same letter combination but pronounced with different sounds due to a combination of different etymologies, and different sound changes. Some of them started out with different pronunciations and stayed different; some of them started out with the same pronunciations and diverged over time. Huh. But it led me to this research..the differences and similarities between homonym, homophone, homograph and heteronym. Fascinating!!
You know Ronni--I honestly cannot think of any at the moment. I shall continue thinking though...but until I do think of some, I shall leave you with this thought: Double o's in english. There are at least three sounds for "oo" in English. Think about these examples: cool, book and floor. If you pronounce these and listen carefully, there is a definate difference. These three words exist in Dutch as well. They are spelled differently but prounounced essentially the same: Here they are in order as above: Koel, Boek and vloer. Let's take the first two to begin with. oe in Dutch has essentially the same sound as oo in English, so it is easy to see and understand how this can happen. Where it gets interesting is with the word, floor. A double o sound in Dutch is always the same---sort of a "long o sound". Boot = "boat". the oo and oa sounds are the same in both languages. Sloot, is pronounced as "sloat". So getting back to floor and vloer then. One would think that given the pronunciation of cool and book that it would follow that floor would be pronounced differently...like it ought to rhyme with the double o sounds in poo, coo, loo and cool. What may have happened is that english speakers took the Dutch word over but wrote the oe sound as double o, knowing that the Dutch pronounced double o as the long o sound in english. All very confusing...."Double Dutch" one might say. Confusing until you think back in history when the state of New York was called New Amsterdam and was owned by the Dutch. Somewhere in the 1700's the power was transferred to the British and there may or may not have actually been a vote by the people to choose which language would be spoken there. English won out. Whether or not this legend was true is fun to debate, but what is true is that after the transfer of power to the British, "Dutch language remained the the primary language for many civil and ecclesiastical functions and most private affairs for the next century". Interesting, eh? Perhaps this is why there are so many Dutch words in English. Spelling, pronunciation and meanings have changed a bit over the years, but traces can still be found.
In Texas, we almost were German speakers. There were so many German settlers that there was a debate in the Texas legislature as to whether German or English should be the "official" language of Texas. English won, by one vote. It was later defeated in practice by "Texian"!
German is pretty clear, the spelling is key to the pronunciation. French has many words that sound the same, but are all spelt differently and have different meanings. English is a Germanic language with a large amount of Latin and French word roots, probably explains why it is weird.
Yes Chinese language do have it too in terms of sound. Written Chinese language is very difficult and if a word is form with an extra stroke or less a stroke it would have a totally different meaning. My Chinese is not good and sometimes I speak it people get confused at what I am trying to say, I get confused myself too!!!
