Now that we know about Word Twins, let’s explore Sound twins known as homophones, originating from ‘homo’ meaning ‘same’ and ‘phone’ meaning ‘sound’.
While homographs are words that are spelt the same but sound different, homophones are words that sound the same but are spelt differently.
For example, “bear” and “bare” both sound like /bɛː/. Similarly, “bawl” and “ball” sound like /bɔːl/. Many students often confuse “there” with “their.” Even professionals get confused with homophones as can be seen in the image of a Seamstress’ store with a board having the word ‘Sowing’ instead of ‘Sewing’, both of which are pronounced alike.
Because of this characteristic, homophones are more conducive to jokes than homographs.
Some Homophone jokes:
- What do you call a bee that can’t quite make up its mind? A maybe.
- Which country’s capital has the fastest-growing population? Ireland, of course. It’s Dublin every day.
- The guy who invented the door knocker got a No-bell prize.
- What did the grape say when it got stepped on? Nothing. But it let out a little whine.
A few years back, I read a post on a Facebook group for the sale of used products, where someone was asking for a “lazy boy.” This particular type of recliner’s name comes from its brand, “La-Z-Boy,” which sounds like “lazy” with the “Z” pronounced “zee”, as in American English instead of “zed.” A tired parent responded that he had one that was 14 years old and went to school! This was a spontaneous joke that these homophones facilitated.
There’s another class of words called homonyms, which are spelt alike and sound alike. Homonym is derived from ‘homo’, meaning ‘same’ and ‘nym’, meaning ‘name’.
While the distinction between homographs, homophones and homonyms is clear in English, it doesn’t apply to syllabic languages like the Indian languages. In Word Twins, I cheated a bit by citing jokes in English that used homonyms instead of homographs. I used the extended definition used for Tamil for those jokes.
Homophones and homonyms are frequently used in advertising, such as using “goodbye” to mean “good buy.” There is a small issue in using such homephones for marketing, though. Some words are not pronounced the same in all parts of the world and thus may not be homophones in every dialect.
For example, in British English, paws, pause, pours and pores are all pronounced the same as /pɔːz/. On the other hand, in American English, paws and pause are pronounced as /pɑːz/ while pours and pores are pronounced as /pɔɹz/. Using a homophone in the wrong market where it is not really a homophone can be ineffective.
Do you know of creative uses of homophones in your language, literature, advertisements or movies? Please share them here.
Photo Courtesy: “Homophone Error” by cynical pink is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
