Footnote 2: [(return)]
Such words have no technical class-name; they are merely extreme examples of the ambiguity common to most words, which grows up naturally from divergence of meaning. True homophones are separate words which have, or have acquired, an illogical fortuitous identity.
Footnote 3: [(return)]
It is probable that in Tyndal's time the awkwardness was not so glaring: for 'beam' as a ray of light seems to have developed its connexion with the eye since his date, in spite of his proverbial use of it in the other sense.
Footnote 4: [(return)]
In Skeat's Etymological Dictionary there is a list of homonyms, that is words which are ambiguous to the eye by similar spellings, as homophones are to the ear by similar sounds: and that list, which includes obsolete words, has 1,600 items. 1,600 is the number of homophones which our list would show if they were all only doublets.
Footnote 5: [(return)]
The following words in List 1 involve wr > w, write, wrach, wrap, wring, wrung, wreck, wrest, wreak, wrick.
Footnote 6: [(return)]
Other similar words occurring in other sections are—awe, awl, ought, bawd, fought, gaud, gauze, haw, caw, cause, caught, lawn, paw, saw, sauce, sought, taut, caulk, stalk, alms, balm;—their correspondents being, oar, orle, ort (obs.), board, fort, gored, gores, hoar, core, cores, court, lorn, pore, sore, source, sort, tort, cork, stork, arms, barm.
Footnote 7: [(return)]
Other similar proper names of species, &c., which occur in some one of the other sections of the list: ant, bat, bear, bee, beet, beetle, beech, box, breeze, date, dock, daw, duck, deer, elder, erne, fir, flea, flag, fluke, hare, horse, hawk, hop, caper, carrot, couch, cricket, currant, leech, lichen, mace, maize, mint, mole, pear, peach, pink, pie, pine, plum, plane, pulse, rabbit, rye, rush, rape, rail, reed, roe, roc, rue, sage, seal, sloe, sole, spruce, stork, thyme, char, whale, whin, yew. Also cockle.
Footnote 8: [(return)]
The homophones sun = son. There is a Greek epigram on Homer, wherein, among other fine things, he is styled,
Ελλανων βιοτη δευτερον αελιον
which Mackail translates 'a second sun on the life of Greece'. But second son in English means the second male child of its parents. It is plain that the Greek is untranslatable into English because of the homophone. The thing cannot be said.
Donne would take this bull by the horns, pretending or thinking that genuine feeling can be worthily carried in a pun. So that in his impassioned 'hymn to God the Father', deploring his own sinfulness, his climax is
But swear by thyself that at my death Thy Sonne
Shall shine as he shines now,
the only poetic force of which seems to lie in a covert plea of pitiable imbecility.
Dr. Henry Bradley in 1913 informed the International Historical Congress that the word son had ceased to be vernacular in the dialects of many parts of England. 'I would not venture to assert (he adds) that the identity of sound with sun is the only cause that has led to the widespread disuse of son in dialect speech, but I think it has certainly contributed to the result.'
Footnote 9: [(return)]
There is a coincidence of accidents—that the Arabic sign for zero is the same with our letter O, and that the name of our letter O (= owe) is the same as the present tense of ought, which is the vulgar name (for nought) of the Arabic zero, and that its vowel does not occur in the name of any cipher.
Footnote 10: [(return)]
Wherever this is not so—as in rhétoric, rhetórical, rhetorícian, cómpany, compánion, &c.—we have a greater freedom in the use of the words. Such words, as Dr. Bradley points out, giving Cánada, Canádian as example, are often phonetic varieties due to an imported foreign syntax, and their pronunciation implies familiarity with literature and the written forms: but very often they are purely the result of our native syllabising, not only in displacement of accent (as in the first example above) but also by modification of the accented vowel according to its position in the word, the general tendency being to make long vowels in monosyllables and in penultimate accents, but short vowels in antepenultimate accents. Thus come such differences of sound between opus and opera, omen and ominous, virus and virulent, miser and miserable, nation and national, patron and patronage, legal and legislate, grave and gravity, globe and globular, grade and gradual, genus and general, female and feminine, fable and fabulous, &c. In such disguising of the root-sound the main effect, as Dr. Bradley says, is the power to free the derivative from an intense meaning of the root; so that, to take his very forcible example, the adjective Christian, the derivative of Christ, has by virtue of its shortened vowel been enabled to carry a much looser signification than it could have acquired had it been phonetically indissociable from the intense signification of the name Christ. This freedom of the derivative from the root varies indefinitely in different words, and it very much complicates my present lesser statement of the literary advantage of phonetic variety in inflexions and derivatives.
The examples above are all Latin words, and since Latin words came into English through different channels, these particular vowels can have different histories.
Footnote 11: [(return)]
It would follow that, supposing there were any expert academic control, it might be possible to save some of our perishing homophones by artificial specialization. Such words are needed, and if a homophone were thus specialized in some department of life or thought, then a slight differential pronunciation would be readily adopted. Both that and its defined meaning might be true to its history.