Why do some words in english just have too many unrelated definitions in them that they could just be their own words
In: 2
Got any examples?
Often, the words might be related in ways you just haven’t thought about. Consider, say, “channel”. That could possibly mean a long, narrow cutting with walls on either side, or it could mean a television channel. But they’re actually related! The way TV used to work is that radio signals would be beamed to your house from a tower. Those radio waves, by law, had to be restricted within a very specific frequency range. A “narrow cutting” of the electromagnetic spectrum, with “legal walls” to either side, you could say. At the time it made sense to use the same word for them because they really were the same thing.
Or perhaps take “minute”, the duration of time, and “minute”, the adjective meaning “small”. Pronounced differently, but spelled the same. These are also related! At the time, the “natural” unit of time to speak about was the hour. Compared to the hour, the minute was a “small” unit of time, and they named it after that fact. It really is that straightforward. (The second, by the way, is named that because it’s literally the *second* (2nd) chopping-into-smaller-units of the hour, with the minute being the first.)
There are some examples though, of two meanings being rolled into the same word despite not being related at all. Often two words that sounded vaguely similar, that over time and lots of mishearings and misspeakings, eventually converged together. I don’t actually have any examples off the top of my head to share, but I know there are some out there.
If you were building a new language from scratch you would probably avoid this right? Unfortunately the overwhelming majority of languages people use (and all of the ones people speak as a first language) are NOT that way. They develop slowly over time from many different sources with hundreds to millions of speakers. As a result words can have different meanings that derive from different sources and usages and then when they come together both are still valid.
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