Ahoy! You...tube.
[laughs]
There's going to be some word play today. I hope you got your noses strapped on
A few days ago I put out a tweet
where I
gave some facts about words that sound the same,
but have different meanings,
like "blue" and "blew".
"Blue" the colour, and "blew" the past tense of blow.
A few people responded with, "yea yea yea, they're called homonyms."
Fair enough.
"Blue" and "blew" are homonyms.
....... or are they?
There's a reason I didn't call them homonyms, and that reason will be made clear in today's episode.
Let's look at three ways two or more words can be similar.
They can have the same meaning,
they can be spelled the same, or they can be sound the same when spoken.
If two words mean the same thing,
but are pronounced differently and have different spellings,
well then they're just.... synonyms.
Synonyms, we've all heard of synonyms before.
An example of synonyms would be
"Buy"
and "Purchase". These two words
have nearly the same meaning, I'll admit that they probably can have different connotations,
like maybe "Buy" is more casual and "Purchase" is more fancy.
*posh voice* "Oh you bought that, but i purchased it hehe because I'm an adult"
Any who, they nearly have the same meaning so they are synonyms.
For those of you who love little fun facts
It often comes up, is there a synonym for synonym?
Not really, but there is a slightly outdated word that isn't used very often.
It looks like a poe-cil-onym,
but really this is pronounced pe-cil-onym.
pecilonym (pronounced) poecilonym (spelling)
It's a good spelling bee word because it's not spelt the way it sounds. Poecilonym
and poecilonym means various names, various names for the same thing... synonyms.
Poecilonym is a synonym for synonym there you go, fun fact of the day *slot machine winning sound*
But we're not done.
What if two or more words mean the same thing and are spelled the same but aren't pronounced alike?
Now we don't really have a word for what those are called, but lets come up with some examples.
"The" and "The" (pronounced "Thee")
They are two ways of pronouncing English's only definite article, so they mean the same thing
however increasingly in American-English especially
"Thee" is being used for emphasis, which tentatively gives it a different meaning.
So "The" and "Thee" might not be like a totally perfect example all the time
sometimes just accent differences can matter, like how I might say "about" and a Canadian might say "aboot"
right, they're spelled the same and they mean the same thing but they sound differently.
Ok what about things that mean the same thing and sound the same but are spelled differently, well these are just spelling variants
For instance, um "Barbecue" spelled like "bar-ba-cue" with a "C", and "Barbeque" spelled like this with a "Q"
Ooh ah, "Barbecue" is not spelt like that it's spelt with an "E"
This is just me words and all, you're welcome
Using a "C" or a "Q" doesn't effect the meaning or the sound of the word it's just a spelling difference
There are two words that also fit into this category that I'm particularly fond of
"Diarrhoea" and "Diarrhea"
There's a fantastic uh mnemonic or acronym that you can use to remember how to spell diarrhoea in the UK fashion
The mnemonic is, Dash In A Real Rush Hurry or Else Accident!
Diarrhoea. Now because I'm in the US we don't always use that "O" so I just remember the mnemonic and then I erase the "O"
Diarrhea
Perfect, diarrhea is a great example of what might fit into this intersection in our Venn diagram
Ok, now lets look in the very middle of our Venn diagram. If two words are spelled the same, are pronounced the same, and have the same meaning.
Well then they are just identical words
an example would be "soup" and "soup"
both sound the same, spelled the same, and refer to the soup
Not so fun, so lets keep moving on. What we have left are these two circles where words either are spelled the same
look the same written down or they sound the same to the ear when spoken
so the differences are between the way they sound, "Phone" And the way they look, "Graph"
Ok
So lets think about words that sound the same but have different meanings and are not spelled the same
Um oh that would be something like what I tweeted
"Blue"
and "Blew"
What distinguishes them is that they look (graph) different (hetero)
so they are heterogrpahs
Now what about words that sound different and mean different things but are spelled the same
Examples of these would be things like
"tear"
and "tear"
If you "tear" apart something I love you might cause me to shed a "tear"
Uh another example is, "Record and "Record"
We can "record" what I'm doing right now, if we do so what we will have made is a "record" of what I did
What distinguishes them is that they have different (hetero) sounds (phones)
they are heterophones
Ok so we have these two differences, heterographs look different, heterophones sound different
In the middle of these two we have words that look the same and sound the same but have different meanings
like "Bank" "Bank" or "Skate" "Skate"
A bank can either be where money is stored or it can be the kind of sloping land near a river, the bank of a river
you wouldn't go get a lone from a river bank, haha
and you wouldn't go fish in a financial bank
Skate, "Skate" means to either slide along but it's also the name of a kind of flat fish
Those words have a very special name, if you want to be really precise
Only words that fall within this part of the Venn diagram are homonyms, same name
Because they sound the same and they're spelled the same
but we can go into even more detail because both of these homonyms "Bank" and "Bank", and "Skate" and "Skate"
aren't equal, one is a true homonym
and the other
is polysemous
heh yea
polysemous means many meanings
if two different meanings of a word share the same origin like the mouth of a river and the mouth of a human
then they are polysemous, but if two words do not have a shared origin but still sound and look the alike well
then their homonymity is quite special, it's true
There are two other categories we can draw here
one involves words that are spelled the same and that's not only include heterophones but also homonyms
so I'm going to draw an outline that includes heterophones and homonyms
Ok now this little piece of the Venn diagram, these are words that look the same. They are what are called
Homographs
Oh my gosh I'm running out of room, homographs
well anyways you guys, you get it you guys are smart. Homogrpahs
Notice that I'm not including words that have the same meaning, they're pretty much just variations of the same
word and they don't get a special name
Homographs look the same, so "Bank" "Bank", "Skate" "Skate", "Tear" "Tear", "Record" "Record" they all look the same
But there's another category which also includes homonyms
as well as
Heterographs
These words sound the same so as you can probably imagine they are called homophones
I don't know how well the silver shows up, but both heterographs and homonyms sound the same, they have the same sound
"Skate" "Skate", "Blue" "Blew" other examples of heterographs would be like "To" "Too" and "Two"
Now often when people talk about homonyms what they're really talking about are homophones and that's
fine which definition of homonym you prefer to use or want to use at a given moment is totally up to you, I don't care
as long as it's clear what you mean that's perfect, I'm a language descriptionist I think language is how
we use it I don't want to prescribe rules of usage onto people
but finally we should talk about. Visemes
Visemes are words that have different meanings, are spelled differently, and sound different but yet have
something very special in common they look the same on the lips
Visemes are words that are difficult to distinguish when lip reading because the way your mouth moves
and the tongue and the inside of your mouth are similar
some of my favorite examples are "Pet", "Bell", and "Men"
in fact we're going to turn the audio off and I'm going to say three of them in some order and I want you in the
comments below tell me what order you think I said them in
(Not sure what order he did them in)
There you go. Alright finally learn more I've got two videos to recommend that are down in the description
one, is about the McGurk Effect, if you've never seen the McGurk effect which ties lip movements into sound
and the audio illusion that emerges you got to check it out
Also Tom 7 who I've talked about in a Vsauce 1 video in the past
has a great video out about a thing he's invented called "Anagraphs". Anagraphs are words that don't share letters they share
letter pieces, it's a fantastic video that's linked below check that one out. While we're talking about nyms
names for words uh I want to talk about somethings that aren't going to show up on this chart
um the opposite of a synonym is an antonym, words that have opposite meanings, like hot and cold
Boring right? What I'm fascinated by are autoantonyms, a word that can also mean the opposite of one of it's meanings
an example would be the word "Off", off can both mean to activate and deactivate, as in my alarm went off so I turned it off
"Left" is another good autoanonym left can mean gone like he left but left can also mean he didn't leave
he's left
There are also autoanonymic phrases like "Wind up" wind up can mean get ready like a wind up for a pitch
but it can also mean we gotta stop
"We gotta wind up", we're out of time
and as always
Thanks for watching