# Do all languages have homophones? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 8, 2013, 5:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656 "2013-10-08T05:26:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![trapezoidal\_jellyfish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/6f9a4e/32.png) [@trapezoidal\_jellyfish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/trapezoidal_jellyfish)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 5:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/1 "2013-10-08T05:26:37Z")
The title pretty much says it all. Homophones are two words that sound the same but have different meanings, like “rain” and “rein.” They can also be spelled the same, like “rose” (the flower) and “rose” (ascended). Do all languages have them? What about homonyms, two words that are spelled the same but have different meanings? ---
**Author:** ![yourstrulykatie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/dc4da7/32.png) [@yourstrulykatie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yourstrulykatie)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 5:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/2 "2013-10-08T05:34:24Z")
I don’t know about other languages, but I do know that Chinese (Cantonese) has homophones. For example: dead & 4 have different characters written in Chinese, but are both said, phonetically, “say.” The intonation on the word also makes a difference on which word you’re actually saying. Side note: that’s why 4 is a bad luck number in Chinese culture. It’s similar to 666 or 13 for the American culture. Same goes for the words 3 & clothes. Both are said “som,” like Tom, but have two different meanings. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 6:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/3 "2013-10-08T06:34:17Z")
I can’t swear that all languages have homophones, but it’s certainly very common. I’ve just done such searching to see if I can find a website with examples of homophones in many languages. This may be as close to such a thing as it’s possible to find online: [http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Homophones\_by\_language](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Homophones_by_language) ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 7:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/4 "2013-10-08T07:13:09Z")
I think Esperanto, and probably other such artificial languages, does not, although no doubt it would eventually acquire some if began to evolve naturally. (That may already have happened.) ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 7:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/5 "2013-10-08T07:38:15Z")
> [@yourstrulykatie](#): > > I don’t know about other languages, but I do know that Chinese (Cantonese) has homophones. Not only does it have them, it appears to have a metric shitton of them. [Behold](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den), the poem written with only one sound ! I don’t speak it myself, but I would expect [lojban](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lojban) to not have very many (if at all), since the whole point of the language is to eliminate as much semantic ambiguity from speech as humanly possible. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 8:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/6 "2013-10-08T08:33:51Z")
Thai has many homonyms, for example: ไม่ /mai/ - not ไหม้ /mai/ - burn You will note that these two words have different tone marks above the ม /m/. _However_, they have identical tones as spoken because the silent ห in the second word changes the syllable’s class. :smack: Since it’s hard for non-native speakers to distinguish tones and subtle vowel distinctions, there are also many near-homonyms which may seem like homophones. /khao/ (sounding like English ‘cow’) can mean rice, white, enter, news, knee, bankroll, horn, mountain, he/she/they. But these words differ in tone or vowel detail except the final three listed which are pronounced (and spelled) the same as each other. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 8:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/7 "2013-10-08T08:47:04Z")
As a slight hijack, this thread made me wonder if sign languages have ambiguous/context-relative gestures. In the case of ASL at least, the answer is yes. The following three pairs apparently share the same sign 1) “nation / of course”, 2) “booth / person” 3) “everything / involve” And, as another hijack, I’m living in China right now, and Mandarin Chinese has many homophones because the valid phonemes (and valid combinations) is so small. The building in which I work has no fourth or second floor, because 4 is a homophone of death, and 2 is a homophone of stupid. Nobody would want to buy the stupid or death office floor. ---
**Author:** ![Don\_t\_Panic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/don_t_panic/32/398_2.png) [@Don\_t\_Panic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Don_t_Panic)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 8:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/8 "2013-10-08T08:51:53Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > And, as another hijack, I’m living in China right now, and Mandarin Chinese has many homophones because the valid phonemes (and valid combinations) is so small. The building in which I work has no fourth or second floor, because 4 is a homophone of death, and 2 is a homophone of stupid. Nobody would want to buy the stupid or death office floor. Mandarin and the other Chinese variants have tones. Doesn’t that cut down on homophones? Or, rather, what I guess I’m really asking: Are there still a lot of words with the same syllables \*and \*the same tones? ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 9:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/9 "2013-10-08T09:02:09Z")
> [@Martian Bigfoot](#): > > Mandarin and the other Chinese variants have tones. Doesn’t that cut down on homophones? Or, rather, what I guess I’m really asking: Are there still a lot of words with the same syllables \*and \*the same tones? The tones help certainly, but even so there are a metric fuckload of homophones. e.g. The two examples I just gave have the same phonemes, and the same tone. Furthermore, in the spoken language I don’t think the tones are always pronounced, so often you have to get the meaning from the context. Now…that might just be because my ears aren’t suitably attuned yet…but what I certainly have heard is people use the wrong tone, for example finish a sentence in a rising inflection, even though that should technically change the meaning of the final word(s). ---
**Author:** ![Sofis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Sofis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sofis)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 12:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/10 "2013-10-08T12:50:57Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > he/she/they. But these words differ in tone or vowel detail except the final three listed which are pronounced (and spelled) the same as each other. If they mean the same thing, sound the same and are spelled the same, surely they’re the same word? Or were you referring to horn, mountain, he/she/they as the final three, or is there some subtlety I’m missing? ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 1:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/11 "2013-10-08T13:07:11Z")
French certainly does: vert (green), verre (glass), ver (worm), vers (towards), vers (verse), vaire (some kind of fur, weasel maybe) are six words with identical pronunciation. Two of them are homographs (as is the plural vers of ver). I don’t think you can come up with six such words in English. It is reputed that Cinderella’s glass slipper was a mistranslation of vaire. It is much harder to find examples in French of heterophonic homographs, such as the verb refuse and the noun refuse, of which I had nearly 100 examples before I realized they were too common to continue collecting them. In French there is fils (plural of fil, wire, pronounced like feel and also son pronounced feece). ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/12 "2013-10-08T16:22:14Z")
> [@Sofis](#): > > If they mean the same thing, sound the same and are spelled the same, surely they’re the same word? Or were you referring to horn, mountain, he/she/they as the final three, or is there some subtlety I’m missing? :smack: Sorry, I overlooked the ambiguity. Yes, horn (antler, not trumpet), mountain, and he/she/they/him/her/them are all spelled and pronounced the same: เขา /khao/. (To illustrate how confusing Thai personal pronouns can be, this word is sometimes used as 1st-person pronoun when speaking to a friend.) ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/13 "2013-10-08T16:29:47Z")
Because Spanish spelling pretty strictly conforms to pronunciation, they are much rarer in Spanish than they are in English or French. However, they do occur. One example is _hoya_ “hole” and _olla_ “pot.” ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/14 "2013-10-08T16:31:27Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > vaire (some kind of fur, weasel maybe) In heraldry, “vaire” is a pattern of blue and white shapes that are supposed to represent squirrel fur (as “ermine” is a pattern of black shapes on white (or vice-versa) that is supposed to represent ermine/weasel fur). Heraldry very much retains some shockingly archaic language, though, so I don’t know if vaire actually means squirrel fur today. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 5:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/15 "2013-10-08T17:09:54Z")
> [@](#): > > Quoth **njtt** : > > I think Esperanto, and probably other such artificial languages, does not, although no doubt it would eventually acquire some if began to evolve naturally. (That may already have happened.) Esperanto advocates sometimes claim that it lacks homophones, but I recall seeing a few examples somewhere or another (that of course I can’t remember). Basically, the roots are all distinct, but there are a couple of cases where a word can be split into roots in two different ways. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/16 "2013-10-08T17:49:20Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > It is much harder to find examples in French of heterophonic homographs, such as the verb refuse and the noun refuse, of which I had nearly 100 examples before I realized they were too common to continue collecting them. In French there is fils (plural of fil, wire, pronounced like feel and also son pronounced feece). Off the top of my head : Avocat (lawyer) and avocat (avocado). Shared pronounciation (ah vo kah) Couvent (nunnery, pronounced koo van) and couvent (2nd person plural form of the verb couver, meaning brooding eggs, pronounced koov) fier (proud, pronounced fih err) and fier (to trust someone, pronounced fee yeh) Président (president, pronounced just like the English word but without the final -t) and président (second person plural form of the verb “présider”, pronounced pre zeedh) Jean (first name, pronounced something like Zon (nasals are hard ! :))) and jean (as in blue jeans, loan word)… I rooted out an attempt at an [exhaustive list](http://www.cetteadressecomportecinquantesignes.com/Best47.htm) here, if you’re interested (website _en français dans le texte_, however). ---
**Author:** ![Asympotically\_fat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e47c2d/32.png) [@Asympotically\_fat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Asympotically_fat)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/17 "2013-10-08T17:52:53Z")
Know ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/18 "2013-10-08T19:43:02Z")
I am far from fluent and there are surely some somewhere, but I can’t think of any in Fulfulde. The language tends to have fairly long words, which cuts down on the possibilities. ---
**Author:** ![Minnie\_Luna](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4bbf92/32.png) [@Minnie\_Luna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Minnie_Luna)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/19 "2013-10-08T19:51:53Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > As a slight hijack, this thread made me wonder if sign languages have ambiguous/context-relative gestures. > > In the case of ASL at least, the answer is yes. The following three pairs apparently share the same sign 1) “nation / of course”, 2) “booth / person” 3) “everything / involve” The signs I learned for nation and of course are similar, but not the same. It may be a regional variation. ---
**Author:** ![KarlGrenze](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dbc845/32.png) [@KarlGrenze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarlGrenze)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656/20 "2013-10-08T22:44:41Z")
The pronunciation of some syllables has changed with time and/or location in various regions that speak Spanish, such that the words “_halla/haya/aya_” are pronounced the same, but have different meanings. _Haya_ is from the verb _haber_, usually used with another verb (\*Espero que haya llegado bien/\*I hope (he/she/formalyou) have arrived well). _Halla_ is from the verb _hallar_, to find. _Aya_ is a noun, it means nanny. Similar with “_casa/caza_” (house/hunt). [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-languages-have-homophones/670656.md?page=2)