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The difference is that English words don't really change meanings based on pronunciation. Words do have many pronunciations, but the meaning remains the same.
by jki275 8y ago
The difference is that English words don't really change meanings based on pronunciation. Words do have many pronunciations, but the meaning remains the same.
- mbel 8y agoOh really, what about 'lead' and 'lead'?
- t-3 8y agoThey will never be confused because context supplies the clues.
- jeremysmyth 8y agoThis is often true, but far from universal. Oftentimes there are differences in verb and noun (as with "lead" and "lead"), or transitive vs. intransitive verbs ("seconded"), but occasionally we have problems with two nouns or two verbs with the same form: "I read that magazine": do I mean regularly, or that I have done in the past? "The messenger wrote down Lincoln's address": was that his home, or his speech? The context would need to be quite explicit to work around problems such as this.
- beat 8y agoIf context supplied enough clues, grammar correction software would work much better than it does.
- davidivadavid 8y agoWords don't change meaning based on pronunciation. They're different words.
- umanwizard 8y agoWhat do you mean? “Dog” and “cat” have different pronunciations in English, and therefore mean different things.
- jki275 8y agoDog and Cat are different words. There are many word pairs in many languages that are written exactly the same way but have different pronunciations and different meanings.
- umanwizard 8y agoYou are thinking of the written language as the fundamental thing. Actually spoken language is fundamental, and writing is an imperfect representation of it. The verb "lead" and the noun "lead" (i.e., the metal) are two different words, pronounced differently. The fact that they are spelled the same is just an example of how the English writing system doesn't encode the English language perfectly accurately.