An objector who should plead that homophones are not a nuisance might
allege the longevity of the Chinese language, composed, I believe,
chiefly of homophones distinguished from each other by an accentuation
which must be delicate difficult and precarious. I remember that Max
Müller [1864] instanced a fictitious sentence
ba bà bâ bá,
'which (he wrote) is said to mean if properly accented _The three
ladies gave a box on the ear to the favourite of the princess._' This
suggests that the bleating of sheep may have a richer significance
than we are accustomed to suppose; and it may perhaps illustrate the
origin as well as the decay of human speech. The only question that it
raises for us is the possibility of distinguishing our own homophones
by accentuation or by slight differentiation of vowels; and this may
prove to be in some cases the practical solution, but it is not now
the point in discussion, for no one will deny that such delicate
distinctions are both inconvenient and dangerous, and should only
be adopted if forced upon us. I shall assume that common sense and
universal experience exonerate me from wasting words on the proof
that homophones are mischievous, and I will give my one example in a
note[8]; but it is a fit place for some general remarks.
[Footnote 8: The homophones sun = son. There is a Greek epigram on
Homer, wherein, among other fine things, he is styled,
[Greek: Ellanon biotae deuteron aelion]
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.']
The objections to homophones are of two kinds, either scientific and
utilitarian, or æsthetic. The utilitarian objections are manifest, and
since confusion of words is not confined to homophones, the practical
inconvenience that is sometimes occasioned by slight similarities may
properly be alleged to illustrate and enforce the argument. I will
give only one example.
[Sidenote: Utilitarian objections not confined to homophones.]
The telephone, which seems to lower the value of differentiating
consonants, has revealed unsuspected likenesses. For instance the
ciphers, if written somewhat phonetically as usually pronounced, are
thus:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
nawt wun too three fawr faiv six sev'n eit nain
by which it will be seen that the ten names contain eight but only
eight different vowels, 0 and 4 having the same vowel _aw_, while 5
and 9 have _ai_. Both these pairs caused confusion; the first of them
was cured by substituting the name of the letter O for the name of
the zero cipher, which happens to be identical with it in form,[9] and
this introduced a ninth vowel sound _ou_ (= owe), but the other pair
remained such a constant source of error, that persons who had their
house put on the general telephonic system would request the Post
Office to give them a number that did not contain a 9 or a 5; and it
is pretty certain that had not the system of automatic dialling, which
was invented for quite another purpose, got rid of the trouble, one of
these two ciphers would have changed its name at the Post Office.
[Footnote 9: 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.]
[Sidenote: Æsthetic objections.]
In the effect of uniformity it may be said that utilitarian and
æsthetic considerations are generally at one; and this blank statement
must here suffice, for the principle could not be briefly dealt
with: but it follows from it that the proper æsthetic objections to
homophones are never clearly separable from the scientific. I submit
the following considerations. Any one who seriously attempts to write
well-sounding English will be aware how delicately sensitive our ear
is to the repetition of sounds. He will often have found it necessary
to change some unimportant word because its accented vowel recalled
and jarred with another which was perhaps as far as two or three lines
removed from it: nor does there seem to be any rule for this, since
apparently similar repetitions do not always offend, and may even be
agreeable. The relation of the sound to the meaning is indefinable,
but in homophones it is blatant; for instance the common expression
_It is well_ could not be used in a paragraph where the word well (=
well-spring) had occurred. Now, this being so, it is very inconvenient
to find the omnipresent words _no_ and _know_ excluding each other:
and the same is true of _sea_ and _see_; if you are writing of the
_sea_ then the verb _to see_ is forbidden, or at least needs some
handling.
I see the deep's untrampled floor
With green and purple seaweeds strewn:
here _seaweeds_ is risky, but _I see the sea's untrampled floor_ would
have been impossible: even the familiar