Grammar Girl, here I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today we're talking about words that are spelled the same but sound different.
And then we'll talk about some lost letters of the alphabet.
This first segment is by Samantha Anslin.
One of our listeners named Greg wrote in recently with a question.
He wanted to know if there's a term for words that change their definition when their syllable emphasis changes.
He mentioned the word invalid as an example.
Now, according to Merriam-Webster, the word means being without foundation in fact or truth, when you stress the second syllable as in invalid, but it means one who is sickly or disabled when you stress the first syllable as in invalid.
Good question, Greg.
There is a term for words that are spelled the same but have different meanings.
They're called homographs.
The homo root means same, and the graph root means right.
Greg pointed out, some homographs are pronounced differently, like wind the movement of air and wind to coil something like a string around another object.
Others are pronounced the same, like odd meaning strange, and odd meaning a number that can't be divided evenly by two.
Wouldn't it be easier for everyone if we just had separate words for totally separate concepts?
Well, here's why we don't.
Some homographs have different etymologies.
For example, the verb match comes from an old English word that means equal or mate, as in saying someone in love has found their match.
Whereas the noun match, the fire stick, comes from a Greek word that meant lamp wick myxa, And the word mixa, in turn, was originally mucus, based on the notion of a wick dangling from the spout of a lamp like snot from a nostril.
I bet you never thought that etymology could be so disgusting.
Another example is the word compact.
The noun compact, meaning an agreement, comes from the Latin verb compocici, meaning to covenant together.
The past tense of this verb was compactum.
In contrast, the verb compact, meaning to press tightly together, comes from the Latin verb copengere, which had the same meaning, and the past tense of that verb was compactus.
Even some words that seem similar can have different origins.
For example, think of the noun ear.
It can be something you hear with or where corn grows on a plant.
Both of those kind of stick out from a body or a stalk, so it could be easy to assume they're related.
But they aren't.
The hearing ear comes from the Old English word are meaning the same thing, whereas the food type of ear comes from the Old English word ar.
That meant spike.
There's another reason two words that are spelled the same can have different sounds and meanings too.
It's because English is what's called a stress-timed language.
Therefore, in English, the meaning of words can change depending on which syllable we stress.
For example, compare the word minute with minute.
These two words are spelled the same but have different meanings.
Same thing with project and project.
Stressed timed languages have some predictable rules.
For example, in two-syllable words, nouns and adjectives usually have the first syllable stressed.
Think of the words picture. table and flower, for example.
In contrast, two-syllable words that are verbs usually have the second syllable stressed.
Think of provide, compose, and conduct.
Our ability to create different meanings by stressing different syllables means that English has a ton of homographs.
Think of object vs. object, present vs. present, import vs. import, suspect vs. suspect.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
Not all languages work this way, though.
In contrast to stress-timed languages like English, there are syllable-timed languages.
In those languages, syllables tend to take up more equal amounts of time.
You can hear this distinction if you compare the word for library in English versus Spanish.
In English we say library, stressing the L sound and saying it more clearly than the brary part library, library.
The same word in Spanish is biblioteca.
Each syllable in that word gets about the same amount of emphasis, biblioteca.
Another example is the word for trash.
In English, we say garbage, emphasis on gar, and hardly saying the uh sound in bhaj at all.
That reduced uh sound that shows up in unstressed syllables, by the way, that's called a schwa.
Now in contrast, the Spanish word for garbage is basura.
We've pronounced each vowel sound in that word clearly, basura.
None of them swallowed.
I'll say one final thing about homographs.
Occasionally they're created almost accidentally when we add suffixes to words.
Think about the word sewer meaning a drain pipe, and sewer meaning one who sews.
The words aren't related at all.
They just happen to be spelled the same because we add the suffix ER to describe someone who does an action.
We see the same thing with batter meaning a mixture of two or more ingredients and batter meaning one who swings a bat.
So to sum up, homographs are words that have different meanings but are spelled the same.
They may or may not have different origins and different pronunciations.
Thanks again for the question, Greg.
That segment was written by Samantha Enslin, who runs Dragonfly Editorial.
You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com.
This next segment is by Karen Lundy.
Have you ever spotted a shop with a sign that says something like ye old curiosity shop?
You might have noticed extra letters like an E on the end of old or an extra P E on the end of shop.
And if you're like most people, you pronounce the phrase the same way.
I just did ye old curiosity shop.
But if you happen to be with a well-informed friend who loves old English, pronouncing Y-E as ye could trigger a well-actually moment, because that Y is isn't a Y at all.
It's a linguistic ghost, a placeholder for a letter that used to exist in English but has since become extinct.
Well, except on ye olde signs intended to be old-fashioned and quaint.
That's because the Y is a placeholder for a letter that has since disappeared from the English alphabet.
The letter was called Thorn, and we'll talk about its pronunciation in a moment.
We'll also talk about its cousin, Eth, and a shapeshifter of a letter called Yoke.
There are three letters that used to be a normal part of English that have vanished over time, leaving some confusing spelling in their wake.
And we'll start with the Thorn because it has the most dramatic origin story.
Old English, the language of Beowulf, spoken roughly between 450 and 1150 CE, had a sound that Latin didn't have the TH sound, as in the and this
Because Latin didn't have the sound, it also lacked a letter for it in its alphabet.
The Anglo-Saxons solved this problem by borrowing from a runic alphabet called Elder Futhark.
They adapted a rune into a letter they called Thorn.
It looked kind of like the letter P, but with a taller top tail.
Or you could think of it as a lowercase L sticking out its tongue.
For centuries, Thorn did this job beautifully.
But then in late medieval handwriting, Thorn and the letter Y started looking nearly identical on the page.
That was the first stage of English drifting away from the letter Thorn.
Later, when William Caxton brought the printing press from continental Europe to England in 1476, the continental typefaces didn't include the thorn.
But printers needed something to represent that TH sound.
And the closest letter they had?
You've probably guessed it was Y.
So printers started using Y to replace Thorn, more for practical reasons than anything else.
The economics of printing simply didn't leave room for it.
By the 16th century, Thorn had basically disappeared from written English, later replaced by the TH combo we use today.
And that brings us back to ye olde curiosity shop.
It sounds charmingly old-fashioned to say it that way, but it's also wrong, because Y represents an old English alphabet letter that was pronounced with a TH sound.
The old curiosity shop.
I'll leave it up to you whether you want to educate your friends about Thorn the next time you go into an antique shop or visit a Renaissance fair.
And then there's F, Thorn's sibling, or maybe it's more of a co-worker.
The lowercase form is written like a lowercase d with a curved stroke through the ascender.
In uppercase, it looks more like a capital D with a line through the left vertical bar.
Th also made the th sound.
So you might be thinking, wait, if we already had thorn for th, then why did we need th?
Well, it's a valid question because mostly we didn't.
In modern English linguistics, we recognize two distinct TH sounds.
There's the voiced one, as in this, there, and the, where your vocal cords buzz a bit.
And then there's the voiceless one, as in thin, think, and thorn, where they don't.
The International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, now uses f for the voiced sound and thorn for the voiceless one, but that's a modern assignment.
In Old English, the two letters weren't reliably linked to one sound or the other, which is actually why they were redundant in the first place.
Linguist David Crystal also noted that thorn and eth were often used interchangeably, even within the same manuscript.
The choice might have come down to something as simple as accent personal preference or which letter the scribe thought looked nicer on the page that day.
So, F was kind of an unnecessary letter from early on.
It faded, first becoming hard to distinguish from the letter D, and then Thorne followed, and both were eventually replaced by TH.
But there's one exception.
In Iceland, Thorne and F are still alive and well.
Modern Icelandic still uses both letters, and they make the distinction precise and deliberate.
So if you ever want to write in a language that kept its original runic TH letters, you have options.
And then there's Jok.
Both uppercase and lowercase forms look very similar to a slightly more stylized numeral three.
Yolk evolved from an early form of the letter G in Old English.
It was pronounced in a few different ways, depending on where it appeared in a word.
At the beginning of a word, or when it followed an E, I, or Y, it sounded like the Y in yellow.
In the middle of a word, it could sound more like a W, and so on.
When the Norman scribes arrived after the conquest of 1066, they started replacing yoke in manuscripts with y, g or gh, and that's why we ended up with strange English spellings like knight k-n-i-g-h-t.
The French taunter in the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail famously spoofed this confusing spelling when he called King Arthur's knights silly English knickets.
And here's the part of the yoke story I love most.
In Scotland Yoke stuck around longer than in England and over time the way Scots wrote yoke started to look more like a cursive Z.
So when printing presses arrived in Scotland, printers just used the Z they had on hand to replace the yoke.
They didn't.
The result is that some Scottish names look like they should have a Z, but don't.
Take the late British politician Mingus Campbell, for instance.
His name is spelled M-E-N-Z-I-E-S.
Or the Scottish surname Mackenzie.
The Z was once a yoke, meaning the name was originally pronounced more like McKenny.
Those strange spellings are yoke's fault, or maybe its legacy, depending on how you look at it.
So the next time you see ye olde anything, you'll know you're not reading a Y at all.
You're reading the ghost of a thorn.
And the next time a Scottish name spelling makes no sense, you can blame yolk.
These letters may be gone, but they left their fingerprints all over English.
Karen Lundy is a career writer and former Quick and Dirty Tips editor.
She writes.
I'll Go First a substack where she shares personal essays and memoir, then hands you a weekly writing prompt and a metaphorical pen.
Find her on igofirst.org.
Finally, I have a familect story from Rebecca.
Hi, Mignon.
This is Rebecca, and my familect word is jammetize.
This is a word my mom came up with in fairly recent history.
This is not something I grew up with, but she says jammetize to sort of celebrate or eventize the moment where we get home from going out to dinner or whatever it is and getting on our pajamas and then watching TV or playing a game.
And now my grown kids say it, and we all really love to jamitize.
It's like the best part of the day.
Thank you, Rebecca.
It's great to have a name for it because it really is the best part of the day.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.
Thanks to Maram El-Nagib, Nat Hoops, Morgan Christensen, Rebecca Sebastian, Holly Hutchings and Dan Feierabend, who recently bought a seven-string guitar.
Rock on, Dan.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all.
Thanks for listening.
