Dear Duolingo: Why do languages have words that sound the same

Welcome to another week of Dear Duolingo, an advice column just for learners. Catch up on past installments here.

Hi, everyone! I wonder if this week's question was inspired by our recent post about English homophones-words that sound the same but have different meanings and spellings. Let's take a look.

Our question this week:

Homophones show up in lots of languages… but why? Words that sound similar or even the same could be confusing for listeners, and they definitely cause headaches for learners. There are actually several reasons why languages have words that sound the same!

1. There are only so many sounds in a given language.

One reason that you'll encounter homophones is that each language uses only a subset of all the possible sounds the human mouth can make. This is true of signed languages, too-each signed language uses only a subset of all the possible handshapes, positions, and orientations our hands and bodies can form.

You can see the full list of individual sounds that have been documented in the world's languages in the charts of the International Phonetic Alphabet, but languages might use a couple dozen sounds of all these possibilities.

Languages also have specific rules about where sounds can be used, how those sounds can be combined into words, and whether pronouncing sounds with different tones can change the meaning of a word. Because of the constraints around combining sounds into words, and all the many meanings we need to communicate, it's not surprising that some combinations end up being used more than once!

There are also cases where multi-word phrases can end up sounding like other words-because the language is pulling from the same set of sounds to make words and phrases. English speakers will be familiar with the confusion between the written forms their,there, and they're because even though they are written differently, and one is even a contraction of a two-word phrase, we pronounce them the same.

The same thing happens in Spanish with the verb haber (the auxiliary verb meaning "to have," as in haber comido "to have eaten") and the phrase a ver (literally "to see," used to mean "well, we'll see"): Because the "h" isn't pronounced in Spanish and because "b" and "v" are pronounced the same, they end up sounding the same, sometimes leading to typos and mix ups in writing.

2. The pronunciation had to be adapted from another language.

If your language borrows a word from another language, in most cases the sounds of the other language get adapted into the sounds and pronunciation rules of your own language. That means that even if a word originally was pronounced differently, it can turn into a homophone when the sounds get adjusted.

This is one of the reasons you've seen videos on social media about how many French words sound the same-they might have started out different in the languages they came from, but they got adapted into French and then went through additional sound changes over time!

3. The words used to be pronounced differently.

In fact, that happens quite a lot: A word's pronunciation is subject to change over time, and different changes can accidentally cause words that used to be different to end up pronounced the same.

As mentioned in #1, the "h" in Spanish is silent… but it wasn't always that way! Many words that have that silent "h" came from Latin words that had an "f" in its place. For example, the adjectives hondo (deep, masculine) and honda (deep, feminine) came from the Latin word PROFǓNDUS. It became perfondo in Spanish and then perhondo before the per- was dropped, leaving Spanish with hondo and honda. (And today, profundo and fondo also exist in Spanish… because they were re-borrowed from Latin *after* the h-dropping stopped.) What a journey!

Meanwhile, one of the Latin words for "wave," like in the ocean, was ǓNDA in Latin, which became onda in Spanish. A much shorter and similar story, for the other half of the honda~onda homophone pair!

4. Other pronunciation rules accidentally create words that sound the same.

Languages don't just have nuanced rules about the pronunciations of individual sounds-there are also complex rules about how to combine words and affixes (prefixes, suffixes, and other part-words that can be added together). Sometimes these combinations end up yielding similar-sounding words!

The English words daze and days are homophones because of how we pronounce the plural -s. When this plural suffix is added to words that end with vowels, it's pronounced as "z." So days becomes a homophone with daze because of this rule about plural endings!

5. A single meaning gave rise to multiple meanings.

It's common for a single word to have slightly different interpretations or nuances depending on context, and over time those subtle differences can grow and evolve into quite distinct uses. And after even more time, those meanings can feel unrelated!

For example, the English word bug can be used to mean an insect, a problem with software, or as verbs meaning "to annoy" or "to spy on with a device." Despite those seemingly unrelated meanings, they all likely come from different ideas associated with insects: pestering us as they fly around, getting into places they shouldn't be, etc.

6. …They aren't pronounced differently.

When it comes to the language we're learning, it could also be the case that the words aren't truly pronounced differently. Instead, it's often the case that native speakers do hear the difference, but learners are still training their ear to notice subtleties that actually seem substantial to speakers of the language.

For example, for English speakers, the words meet (or meat!) and mitt are just totally different words-not similar, not confusing, just night-and-day different. But if you're an English learner whose language doesn't have the "ih" sound in mitt (IPA: /ɪ/), your ear-and your brain!-will initially treat the vowels in meet and mitt as the same. It takes a lot of exposure to English and a lot of practice making and noticing the difference to get the hang of it.

Another famously difficult sound contrast is from Hindi, and it leads many (even most!) learners to simply not hear all the differences. It's like having a homophone hallucination! For example, Hindi has four consonants that are pronounced really similarly: In the IPA, they are written /p/, /b/, /p^h/, and /b^h/. These sounds differ according to whether you vibrate your vocal folds in your throat when you say them (vibration for /b/ and /b^h/, no vibration for /p/ and /p^h/), and whether you release a tiny puff of air after them (puff of air for /b^h/ and /p^h/, no puff for /b/ and /p/).

English speakers are used to using our vocal folds to vibrate for some sounds and not for others, and we even do this little puff of air after lots of "p" sounds, for example after the "p" in puff… but because you have probably never thought about that little puff before, your brain isn't trained to listen for it. For example, English speakers might not even hear it after "b" sounds, and we're apt to mix up /p/ without the puff of air for /b/.

Oh, also: Hindi also has the vocal fold + puff of air differences for "t" and "d" sounds and "k" and "g" sounds, too ‍

Sounds about right!

In most cases, homophones can be distinguished based on context-which means learners need lots of practice to build up good instincts about how words fit together in sentences. So keep studying!

For more answers to your language and word origin questions, get in touch with us by emailing [email protected].

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