English Multinyms | Hacker News Reader

English Multinyms

people.sc.fsu.edu

64 pointsmyroon574 comments

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'Polynyms', surely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarism_(linguistics)

I've never heard of 'Multinyms' but I am right in thinking they're just homophones ?

The first line of text after the title:

> multinyms are examples of triple/quadruple/quintuple/sextuple homonyms.

> According to some definitions, a homonym is a word with the same pronunciation as, but different meaning than, another word. Thus, homonyms come in pairs (at least). However, some remarkable homonyms come in triples, as you may here behold.

This is extremely dependent on dialect and accent, but they don't specify which one they're talking about.

> borough, burro, burrow

Nah, not 'round 'ere they ain't.

I also maintain a list of these. Here are some I don't see there:

greater grater grader

baron barren bearing

your cees, seas, sees, seize is missing cease

grisly grizzly gristly

pedal peddle petal

I also put since with cense, cents, scents, sense

steal steel still

peal peel pill

If you need help: Ewe mite higher too guise two bee yore assistance.

Where are you from that you consider all of these groups to have the same pronunciation?

Earth?

In American English, terminal d's and t's usually sound the same unless the speaker takes deliberate care to enunciate them, so that would cover the greater and pedal cases.

The criteria for my list is that they are taken from real life misspellings, mostly from facebook or youtube comments but also from news media. I have noticed that a lot of people don't bother to consider the proper spelling of words but rather they just spell a word however it sounds to them. So apparently some people pronounce these words the same. Feel free to make your own list of multinyms that fit your own criteria.

Hmm, that seems to stray from the general definition of "multinym" as used in the OP.

If we did stick with the idea of pronunciation, some of the examples from your list could be included if we allow regional accents, e.g. steel-still, peel-pill. However, those accents would also include many other sets not in the OP. barren-bearing particularly stands out, because I can't think of any accent that pushes those together audibly.

In the United States South, its very common to drop the 'g' at the end of a word ending in '-ing'. barren-bearing can definitely sound the same here.

Warning, very broadly generalizing now, but here goes...

> I have noticed that a lot of people don't bother to consider the proper spelling of words but rather they just spell a word however it sounds to them.

This is my "spot the native English speaker" trick. Some native speakers consistently type "your" no matter if they mean "your" or "you're", and either "their" or "there" whenever they should have used one of "their", "there" or "they're".

My experience is that people who have learned English as a second language don't make this particular mistake as much - although we make tons of other mistakes, of course!

My guess is that the cause of this is that native speakers learn the language mostly by listening, long before they learn to read and write. Consequently, to them a word is primarily defined by its pronunciation. Its spelling is a secondary property that's attached years later.

For second language speakers, a word's spelling is usually something they're exposed to immediately when they learn the word - in many cases even before they learn how it's pronounced. To them, the spelling is what primarily defines a word.

It's a bit frustrating. I tend to get confused when "your" is used in place of "you're", and I usually have to reread the sentence once before I decipher the meaning.

Having a nonstandard American dialect is even worse. Texas dialects have a much broader set of larger contractions than coastal and Midwest accents. Autocorrect becomes an active enemy when I'm trying to type "I'd'nt've" or "y'couldn't'v'nt'd".

> Autocorrect becomes an active enemy when I'm trying to type "I'd'nt've" or "y'couldn't'v'nt'd".

This must be the first time I'm on Autocorrect's side ;->

What is the "nt'd" in supposed to be short for?

"y'couldn't'v'nt'd" to me sounds like "you couldn't have unted", which is true as I've never "unted" anything in my life.

I guess "I'd'nt've" means "I don't have", but in British English we'd still write that as "I don' 'av'" (as we'd also drop the t).

Perhaps "I'd'nt've" is intended to be "I'dn't've", i.e. "I would not have":

I would -> I'd

would not -> wouldn't

So "I would not" -> "I'dn't"?

Sure, but I was asking about the "'nt'd" at the end of all that.

As a British English speaker, I can't even guess what verb they're trying to say that they wouldn't / couldn't have done.

Sorry, I should have made clear I was responding only to this part of your message:

  I guess "I'd'nt've" means "I don't have"

I think it meant 'I would not have', not "I don't have".

I dunno man. I'm just typing what I hear & say. The first is "I do not think I would have done that", more or less. The second is "I could not have done that" but with an agreeing second negative? Like a hill people "I wouldn't do that if I weren't you."

Aaron Earned An Iron Urn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Esl_wOQDUeE

What part of the world are you from? I ask because this is the first that I've heard that `greater` and `grader` are pronounced the same and now I am curious what country you are in.

For everything in this list, there is at least one word that is not pronounced the same as the other two.

> greater grater grader

> baron barren bearing

> grisly grizzly gristly

> pedal peddle petal

> I also put since with cense, cents, scents, sense

> steal steel still

> peal peel pill

Words that are words, backwards, but are not palindromes. My boss is awesome and when I find a new one at 200am and excitedly text him, he congratulates me.

Not, nut, tub, bard, trap, ...

I'm from South Carolina, USA and I pronounce 'greater' and 'grader' the same. There is a subtle difference and that difference can be more noticeable sometimes, but most of the time I'm saying them the same.

For everything in this list, its incredibly common for these groupings to have the same pronunciation where I live.

Some of these have different pronunciation (depending on accent?), e.g. parish vs perish

Within UK dialect there would be some significant differences in many of these words, even ignoring the meddle/mettle examples - farrow/pharaoh is easily distinguishable, too.

I would say, though, that to people _outside_ the dialect, there may be many more words that are indistinguishable. Listening to Scots speakers requires a lot more effort for me because to my ears, many of the differences in the words are extremely subtle.

"farrow"/"pharaoh" is more than easily distnguishable - to me, the first vowel in these are nowhere even close to the same - I use "a" from "apple" for "farrow" and "ai" from "air" for pharoah, along with a contrast in vowel lengths, again like "apple" and "air".

EDIT: interesting grammar note - as a native speaker, I can't even decide if that should be "first vowel in these is" or "first vowels in these are" or what I actually wrote above which is what seems more natural to me, although immediately stood out to me as grammatically inconsistent when I re-read it after posting...

> as a native speaker, I can't even decide if that should be "first vowel in these is" or "first vowels in these are" or what I actually wrote above which is what seems more natural to me, although immediately stood out to me as grammatically inconsistent when I re-read it after posting...

I would say that the former (“first vowel in these is”) is ‘more correct’, but it sounds weird because it contains the plural “these” immediately before the singular “is”. What you actually wrote is inconsistent strictly speaking, but it feels better because the verb agrees with the immediately preceding word. (This kind of thing is rather common in languages with agreement.)

I agree it's heavily accent dependent and I suspect the original compiler wasn't that aware of non-mainstream US accents.

It's interesting that many of these are only the same (initially at least) if you've been sloppy/ignorant in your pronunciation and then those become baked in ways of saying something.

We're due to get a lot more of these given how often you hear influencers guessing at what to me seem fairly mainstream pronunciations!

These are often a way that TTS systems slip up most obviously. A lockdown project I tinkered with several years back was a small (traditional) LM that had been fed with tagged examples and could thus predict fairly well the best sense for a particular case. It made a huge difference to perceived quality. Now of course, many TTS cope with this fairly well but you still hear the off slip up!

Yeah for sure, i think if i use homonyms close to each other i might even try to emphasize the difference. For /ˈparɪʃ/ and /ˈpɛrɪʃ/ its definitely an accent thing.

Other examples:

* borough, burrow

* call, caul, col

* knot, naught, not

* sic, sick, Sikh

* sics, Sikhs, six

* taught, taut, tot

* cinque, sink

* dew, do

* mall, moll, maul, mawl

Maybe some of these aren't just a matter of accent, but the individual. I say "borough" like "bore-oh" but I feel like plenty of people in my area would say "burr-oh" and I wouldn't bat an eye.

Some of them are in multiple languages, which surely violates the principle?

* bold, bolled, bowled

I definitely pronounce "bold" and "bowled" differently, the former is one vowel and in the latter I'd say it's two vowels, gliding to a more closed and pursed mouth before the "ld" cluster.

I've never heard of "bolled" before, but just from looking at it, I'd imagine I'd pronounce it with a longer "l" alveolar compared before gliding to the "d". I think I have an old fashioned way of saying "polled" compared to how I hear others saying it.

I might be strange in my pronunciation though, I'd also distinguish between "call" and "caul" in the same way as "bald" and "bowled".

  Thanks to Warren Kinney for distinguishing the British pronunciation of "new" and "knew"

I'm confused about this. I'm from London, and I say these two words exactly the same way.

I think in some places one is pronounced "noo" and one is "niew," although honestly I could see either one for either meaning.

Multinyms, so words with multiple pronounciations/names?

Anyway, I'm not a native speaker, but e.g. air, are, e'er, ere, err, heir does not sound identical to me. The Oxford English Dictionary says: ɛː, ɑː/ə, ɛː, ɛː, əː, ɛː, which makes are and err different. Unfortunately, the author doesn't give a source, so it's probably just his dialect?

I'm a native English speaker (UK) and I'd pronounce some of those words differently. Certainly "air" and "are" sound very different. "e'er" would sound slightly different as it's spoken almost like two syllables, though not quite.

I'd also take issue with "sick" and "Sikh" as Sikh has a slightly different vowel sound - somewhat longer than the short "i" in sic/sick. I'd say that "Sikh" and "seek" are homonyms.

Further down the list, I've just spotted "taught, taut, tot" and "tot" doesn't belong there.

I also would have said "Sikh" and "seek" are homonyms until recently when I found out that Sikhs' preferred pronunciation is generally to sound closer to "sick" (aspirate the H if you like)

To be fair I don't know any Sikhs, though there is a Sikh community where I live (there's a Sikh temple at the bottom of my road).

I'm going to listen out for how Sikhs pronounce it.

And yet you wanted to correct someone else, without ever having heard someone say it? I moved from California to Louisiana, and while my pronunciation / idioms used to get poked at in good cheer, I never deigned to correct the natives - "its the ten freeway, get it right, I should know, it starts in my state!"

> And yet you wanted to correct someone else, without ever having heard someone say it?

I've heard "Sikh" pronounced many times by native english speakers and that invariably sounds like "seek". Now that I've heard that it's pronounced differently by the Sikhs themselves, I'll aim to use the correct pronunciation. This is an unusual situation in that I am a "native" (i.e. a native of England) and arguably Sikhs are non-native though I'd expect most of them near us were born here.

Also, the English have a long history of turning up in other countries and pushing their own religion/language/culture onto the natives, so maybe I'm just a product of my upbringing?

Also from the UK and have just learnt that I've likely been pronouncing it incorrectly. Here is a video where a Sikh uses the word several times and it sounds like "sick": https://m.youtube.com/shorts/kM1-DUTgTC4

It feels similar to the situation with "Muslim" or "islam", which have a proper "s" sound in Arabic (as in "messy") rather than a "z" sound (as in "music").

Or Škoda cars that most people call "Skoda" when it should be pronounced more like "Shkoda"

It's an interesting question as to whether an adopted word gets to be overridden by the preferences of the target!

Suppose the people of Edinburgh didn't happen to like Ee-dan-borghh as the French say it, that doesn't make the French pronunciation "wrong".

> "e'er" would sound slightly different as it's spoken almost like two syllables, though not quite.

I'm a native English speaker (US). Sometimes when I say "ever"/"never", the 'v' sound drops out. So I end up saying "e'er"/"ne'er" but it sounds like "air"/"nair".

> Further down the list, I've just spotted "taught, taut, tot" and "tot" doesn't belong there.

I pronounce all of these the same

I'd say that "taught" and "taut" rhyme with "sport", whereas "tot" rhymes with "spot"

Right, you said you're from the UK so that's in line with what I would have expected. My unstated point was that multinyms are intrinsically tied to dialects so there is no absolute list of multinyms

> multinyms are intrinsically tied to dialects so there is no absolute list of multinyms

Definitely. I find it fascinating how pronunciations can change so much geographically and the UK certainly has some variety in that regard.

I remember being a kid on a German school exchange and being surprised that they couldn't distinguish between "salary" and "celery". I've also heard that Germans find it almost impossible to pronounce "squirrel".

I also had difficulty on a holiday to the U.S. and trying to ask someone in a shop where the "batteries" were. He just couldn't understand me until I described them and he said "Oh! Badderies". My wife also had a problem asking for "Winston's" cigarettes until the lady at the counter exclaimed "Wenston's"

The "are" listed is "a metric unit of measure, equal to 100 square meters", not a conjugation of "be". Google pronounces it like "air".

It's 1/100th of a hectare, and pronounced like the "are" in "hectare".

This reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...

Edit: It's not on the list because its using multiple meanings of the same spelling...

The list is precisely words with multiple meanings of the same spelling, but there are only two meanings of "buffalo" that aren't proper names, and this list is about words with three or more meanings.

(As an aside, I've always felt that you can have unlimited "buffalos" in a sentence, without ever using the name of the city, through a process of recursion, but I'm not enough of an authority to get my version into the Wikipedia article...)

Yeah, not a candidate for the list. I thought it wasn't because the list was about > 2 different spellings that sound "identical" but mean different things.

I agree with you and when I (a non-linguist) first learned about this it did occur to me that there was probably some infinite recursive version and it took *some* of the fun out of it. Its' still fun as is this list.

I also suspect there are lots of good examples of whatever a word with multiple meanings with different parts of speech is called. So it should be possible to find...use many "Buffalo buffalo buffalo..."

I prefer the Police version https://medium.com/luminasticity/grammatical-infinities-what...

I'd argue that that post isn't quite correct. They say you can't always add one and have it be correct, I think you can.

One word: "Police!" This is the odd-duck, you can have a one-word imperative statement telling you to police.

Rule 1: We can always have a [Noun phrase] + [verb], the verb just says what the noun phrase does.

Two words: "Police police." (Cops police) What do cops do? They police.

Rule 2: Any time you have a [noun phrase] + [verb], you can add a direct object to the verb.

Three words: "Police police police." Who do the cops police? They police other cops.

Finally rule 3: Any time you have a [subject] + [verb] + [object] you can rearrange the object to make it the subject of a new sentence. In this case, the subject of the new sentence would be "Cops that other cops police." Or "Police (that) police police."

In English, the "that" is not necessary (though it usually helps with clarity). For instance, we can say "Mice cats eat are usually the slow ones."

Then apply rule 1, we can take any noun phrase and add a verb to it to describe what those entities do. ("Mice cats eat die.")

So four words (Rule 3 + 1): "Police police police police." The cops that other cops police, themselves police.

Five words, from rule 2, who do they police? "Police police police police police."

Six words, from rules 3 + 1, rearrange and add a verb: "Police police police police police police."

etc.

hmm, yeah that's right with the imperative model you can have a grammatically correct sentence as well, so that means

the sentence [police police] police [police]

meaning: The police police will police the police.

could also be

[police police police] police!

meaning: the members of the set police police police (those who police the special police forces that police the normal street police) commit the action of policing!

If I'm understanding what you are saying?

Kind of. Though it doesn't need to be in the imperative. "Cats sleep" is a fine descriptive phrase of what cats do. "Police police" is similarly a description of what cops do.

But the original article seems to have "Police police" as a noun phrase, meaning "the police of the police," and that's how it goes to infinity -- you can keep on adding another "police" to the noun phrase.

That seems uglier to me. It just a string of nouns and an assertion that the "police police" (or the "police police police") are a named thing.

My version takes a object of the sentence and makes it a noun phrase. So if the cops hunt criminals, we could make a noun phrase: the criminals that cops hunt. We can then make add a verb at the end. "Criminals cops hunt fight." (When the criminals get hunted, they get anxious and start fighting.) You can then add a object to that verb. "Criminals cops hunt fight alligators." Replace all those nouns and verbs with "police" and you get your sentence.

Throw in regional accents and you’ll get many more! Aaron earned an iron urn: https://youtu.be/Esl_wOQDUeE?si=J34OmyDod7GHUrl1

Real eyes realize real lies.

> Sextuplets:

> air, are, e'er, ere, err, heir

When does "are" sound like the rest?

It's a unit of measure, not a form of 'to be'.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43398196

When referring to the metric unit of area - more commonly seen in the form "hectare".

But this is all very dialect/accent-dependent. Personally, I'd put a bit of a glottal stop in the middle of "e'er", and would say the "err" more like it could be written as "irr", so that set would only be a quadruplet for me.

For: call, caul, col

Wot about: cawl ?

Another one from my list that is missing is:

Cents Scents Sense Since

Data: Captain, the censors have detected incoming copyright infringement notices.

Riker: Shields up!

Are we not going to count: Gnu Knew New

Kneel Neal Neil

Knight Night Nite

Knot Naught Not

Lager, Lauger (a last name), Logger

Macs Mac's Macks Maks Max

Tends Tens Tins

Threw Through Thru

Ware Wear (clothing), Wear (diminished by use) We're Where

Your You're Yore

boar, Boer, boor, bore

How about adding: Bohr

For this one: cense, cents, scents, sense

Please add: Since

Peaking Peeking Peking

Many of these are totally pants/panz/pænts

I would add yaw/yore/your/you’re

That's that rhotal R in yaw? Like how I purposefully say "strawrberry"?

air, are, e'er, ere, err, heir

I guess I need to go back to school because I pronounce some of them quite differently.

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