Does anyone have an idea of how the two words wind and wind started? Wind from “The wind outside is strong” and wind from “The winding path is much longer”. Any thoughts on a pitcher winding up?
I suppose the real question I have is how two words “wind” and “wind” can have such different pronunciations, different meanings, but exact spellings. Can anyone else think of other examples?
And thus breaks my status of a lifetime lurker… I’ve been lurking since Cecil’s brain icon graced my AOL screen.
wind | Etymology, origin and meaning of wind by Etymonline gives the separate origins as being from two different Old English words.
And welcome to non-lurkerdom 
Bow and bow (bow and arrows; bow to the lady)
Lead
Well, tear (when crying) and tear (when ripping a cloth) come to mind. When you’re puzzled with the origins of english words, a good place to start is http://www.answers.com/ which usually gives a quick and short etymology of a given word from Houghton Mifflin dictionary. Often the reason for this wind/wind phenomenon is that two similar-looking words with nonsimilar meaning have been loaned to English different times, thus leading to pronunciation differences. These kind of situations are quite common in English, not so in other, more logical languages; this article calls such words heteronyms (see http://www.answers.com/heteronym for more).
A-ha, and another word for this seems to be homograph (though I suppose then the pronunciation could also be similar and only meaning different, like with the words mean, mean and mean). And it should’ve been obvious that there is a list of English heteronyms in Wikipedia already.
“Read” and “read”: I like to read, so yesterday I read a book.
Polish and polish
What about lie? “Don’t lie to me!” and “Lie down, that’s a good dog!”
In both instances, I would pronounce them the same way, with a long i sound. Which pronunciation differs and how is it pronounced?
That’s the one I was thinking of. I’m tutoring an ESL student right now and this concept really, really confuses him…
Off topic: Welcome to the SDMB, 德特金生! An initiation thread has been started in your honor.
:o I grabbed two words spelled the same, but with different meanings, they do sound almost exactly the same, and I hadn’t thought of the fact that most people don’t differentiate when saying them. For me, there is a tiny subtle difference, but not enough to really take note of, like the words marry and merry. I say the first “lie” more emphasis on the long I sound, the second with more emphasis on the L sound. Right then, close and close. “Don’t stand so close to me!” (CLohs) and “Close the door, you’re letting in flies.” (clOHZ) They do sound different, and mean different things too.
One also often finds a noun and verb with the same spelling and related meanings, but different pronounciation, such as “record” and “record”. I seem to recall that this example is typical, in that the noun is stressed on the first syllable and the verb is stressed on the second, but I can’t remember any of the other examples. And, of course, this isn’t too relevant to one-syllable words like “wind” (either version).
“Turn that bass down! You’re scaring the bass! Does this mean I can make noise while we’re hunting does? Don’t get me so wound up that I’m forced to wound you.”
Am I the only one that see the name of person that started this thread is just a bunch of boxes?
It appears to be composed of some combination of Chinese and/or Japanese characters, so your system is probably not set up to see them.
So how shoud someone pronunce the first word in this sentence?
Polish my boots please. 