Italian is quite similar, but they also occur: ho, hai, and ha (first, second, and third person singular of avere: “to have”) are pronounced identically to o, ai, and a (“oh”, “to the”, and “to”). I’m sure there are others.
There are a handful of homonyms as well: pene can mean “penis” or “pains” (plural of pena) and piano can mean both “soft” (and the instrument, but that’s a derivation) or “story” as in floor of a building.
Yes, that happens quite a bit. Example: team/o ‘team’, and te/am/o ‘love of tea’.
(This is a typical way of indicating word structure in Esperanto. Slashes / divide word roots. The ‘/o’ indicates a final ending -o which indicates that the word is a noun. Technically, the -o is a separate word root that means ‘thing that is’, but people usually describe this in terms of endings.)
Another: sorĉ/trumpet/o ‘trumpet of the sorcerer’ and sort/ŝtrumpet/o ‘sock of doom’. This one is interesting because the changing division point is in the middle of a consonant cluster and is spelt two different ways depending on where the word roots came together. The letter ĉ is pronounced the same as the letter combination tŝ, like English ‘tsh’.
Note that two of the examples given here depend on “ll” and “y” being homophones, as does pollo/poyo (chicken/base on which you place something temporarily). For people who differentiate ll and y, those words wouldn’t be homophones. For most speakers, casa and caza are pronounced the same way: either both casa (the majority, this is called seseo) or both caza (called ceceo); for me they’re distinct.
Good examples, except for this one: “piano” meaning “floor of a building” is also originally the same word (i.e., a “derivation”), the root meaning being “flat”.
You missed the word “heterophonic”. “Avocat”, lawyer, is pronounced exactly the same as “avocat”, avocado. But the two words spelled “fils” are pronounced differently. English has dozens (if not hundreds) of examples; French appears to have almost none.
Marathi has no or very few homophones that are not true homonyms. The language distinguishes between voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated consonants, and uses a script (Devanagiri) that makes the same distinction. Furthermore, Devanagiri uses conjoined consonant-vowel groups that makes it look more like a syllabary. As a result, if a word is pronounced in a certain way, there is only one possible spelling.
That being said, there may be dialects that do not make as strong a distinction between the sounds of various consonants, and may therefore have homophones, or may have non-standard ways of pronouncing specific words.
This example arises in Hindi, which uses the same writing system as Marathi, and, in theory, has the same feature. But many common Hindi dialects do not pronounce certain words as they are written, leading to more possible homophones.
I should have mentioned that the example I gave depended on dialect.
OK, now I have this mental image of a warlock taking off a very ominous looking stocking, and blowing through it, to grave magical effect.
It’s the Sock of the End Times!
Yeah, I wanted to correct that mistake after posting, but the edit window was over. The other 4 I listed are properly heterophonic though, and the link provided lists about 180.
Sorry, I read your first example and dismissed it as, “He doesn’t understand.” I did look at the link and it was interesting. Some of the examples (interviewer) were such obvious borrowings, as were the two pronunciations of forte, that they are hard to credit, but many were really French. Such as the ones along the lines of couvent. I have sent the link to my French speaking friend who had been able to come up with only one example, in addition to my fils (I think it may have been fier).
I need to correct my own post here, because I don’t want to spread misinformation on the dope of all places…
The word for number 4 is “si4” whereas death is “si3” (or “si3wang2”), where the number indicates the tone, so they are not homophones.
It is true though, that the similarity of these words is why 4 is considered unlucky, and I was right at least that “two” and one of the words for “stupid” are true homophones (“er4”).
Finally it’s also true that there are a shedload of homophones in Mandarin, even with the 4 1/2 tones.