So sweet a kiss the golden sun gives not
To those fresh morning drops upon the rose,
As thy eye-beams when their fresh rays have smote
The night of dew that on my cheeks down flows.
Let alone the complication that _mote_ is also a homophone, and
that outside Gulliver's travels one might as little expect to find a
house-beam as a castle-moat in a man's eye, the confusion of _beam_
is indefensible, and the example will serve three purposes: first to
show how different significations of the same word may make practical
homophones, secondly the radical mischief of all homophones, and
thirdly our insensibility towards an absurdity which is familiar: but
the absurdity is no less where we are accustomed to it than where it
is unfamiliar and shocks us.
[Sidenote: Tolerance due to habit.]
And we are so accustomed to homophones in English that they do not
much offend us; we do not imagine their non-existence, and most people
are probably unaware of their inconvenience. It might seem that to
be perpetually burdened by an inconvenience must be the surest way of
realizing it, but through habituation our practice is no doubt full
of unconscious devices for avoiding these ambiguities: moreover,
inconveniences to which we are born are very lightly taken: many
persons have grown up to manhood blind of one eye without being aware
of their disability; and others who have no sense of smell or who
cannot hear high sounds do not miss the sense that they lack; and so I
think it may be with us and our homophones.
But since if all words were alike in sound there would be no spoken
language, the differentiation of the sound of words is of the essence
of speech, and it follows that the more homophones there are in
any language, the more faulty is that language as a scientific and
convenient vehicle of speech. This will be illustrated in due course:
the actual condition of English with respect to homophones must be
understood and appreciated before the nature of their growth and the
possible means of their mitigation will seem practical questions.
[Sidenote: Great number.]
The first essential, then, is to know the extent and nature of
the mischief; and this can only be accomplished by setting out the
homophones in a table before the eye. The list below is taken from
a 'pronouncing dictionary' which professes not to deal with obsolete
words, and it gives over 800 ambiguous sounds; so that, since
these must be at least doublets, and many of them are triplets or
quadruplets, we must have something between 1,600 and 2,000 words of
ambiguous meaning in our ordinary vocabulary.[4]
[Footnote 4: 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.]
Now it is variously estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 words is about the
limit of an average educated man's talking vocabulary, and since the
1,600 are, the most of them, words which such a speaker will use
(the reader can judge for himself) it follows that he has a foolishly
imperfect and clumsy instrument.
As to what proportion 1,700 (say) may be to the full vocabulary of the
language--it is difficult to estimate this because the dictionaries
vary so much. The word _homophone_ is not recognized by Johnson or
by Richardson: Johnson under _homo-_ has six derivatives of Herbert
Spencer's favourite word _homogeneous_, but beside these only four
other words with this Greek affix. Richardson's dictionary has an even
smaller number of such entries. Jones has 11 entries of _homo-_, and
these of only five words, but the Oxford dictionary, besides 50 words
noted and quoted beginning with _homo-_, has 64 others with special
articles.
Dr. Richard Morris estimated the number of words in an English
dictionary as 100,000: Jones has 38,000 words, exclusive of proper
names, and I am told that the Oxford dictionary will have over
300,000. Its 114 _homo-_ words will show how this huge number is
partly supplied.
Before the reader plunges into the list, I should wish to fortify his
spirit against premature despair by telling him that in my tedious
searching of the dictionary for these words I was myself cheered to
find how many words there were which are _not_ homophones.