How did homographs come to be? Was it people misusing words?
In: Other
all language are fluid and changing, and spelling and speech are not always insync. like “live or live”
In English this normally happens due to one of two causes:
1. Two words with different origins that ended up being spelled the same but kept aspects of their root for pronunciation.
2. Words with the same root where accent symbols never made it into English – eg live and live (“I used to *live* in New York” and “now we go *live* to New York for the Yankees game”). Other languages annotate their letters for this stuff ì, í, î etc to let you know the vowel changes or where emphasis is placed. English doesn’t – partly because vowels don’t consistently map to letters (this is often due to point #1 above) so an “e” could be one of about a dozen vowel sounds and you’re just supposed to know which one to use. This is in contrast to languages like Spanish where there are five vowel sounds, that each always map to the same letter, and the é á í etc tell you when the emphasis syllable changes.
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