Buzz
Are there homophones in languages beyond English?Ben Waggoner:
There's an old story about a Spaniard who invited an American to his home. His English wasn’t great, so he quickly searched for the English equivalents of the Spanish words he wanted to use. When the guest arrived, the Spaniard greeted him with, 'Between, and drink a chair!'
The punchline is that the Spaniard intended to say, 'Come in, and have a seat!'—¡Entre, y tome una silla!—but mistakenly swapped the homophones entre, which means 'between,' and entre, the polite imperative of entrar, which means 'to enter.' The other part of the joke is that tomar can mean either 'to take' or 'to drink'; it's not exactly a homophone, but a word with a wider range of meanings.
A quick glance at Wiktionary refreshed my knowledge of Russian, revealing мой, moj, which can mean either 'my [masc.]' or 'wash!' (2nd person singular imperative of мыть). From the same root, we get мыло, mylo, which can either mean 'soap' or 'it [neut.] washed' (neuter singular past of мыть). There's also мат, mat, which can mean 'checkmate' or 'curse words; obscenities'—the first borrowed from Persian (as is 'checkmate' from shah mat, 'the king is dead'), while the second comes from the nearly identical мать, meaning 'mother.' The expression for 'to use profanity' (ругаться матом) literally means 'to speak ill of someone's mother.'
Then there's the most famous Russian homophone, мир, mir, meaning 'peace' or 'world.' These words were once distinguished in spelling before 1920, with the word for 'world' spelled мір, but Soviet spelling reforms made them indistinguishable, as seen in Мир миру, mir miru, 'peace to the world!,' a common Soviet slogan. Just to elaborate, some have suggested that мир in the sense of 'peace' may have its origins in the Indo-Iranian god of contracts and order, Mithra. Some even argue that both мир and Mithra share a PIE root meaning 'to bind', *mei-.
Finally, I explored some homophones in Old Norse, a language I'm somewhat familiar with:
- afl: 'strength' or 'hearth of a forge'
- fastr: 'firm; fixed' or 'prey that a bear drags back to its den'
- mál: 'language; speech' (also 'a matter for discussion') or 'measurement; interval of time' OR 'decorative metal inlay'
- nema: 'except; unless' or 'to take; to learn'
- reiða: 'to carry' or 'outfit; equipment'
- valr: 'hawk' or 'those killed in battle'
- veita: 'to give; to offer' or 'to dig a ditch; to make a watercourse'
This could easily be a plotline in Vikings. Picture Ragnar shouting, 'Damn it, Floki, I told you that what we had to discuss was offering the battle-slain to Odin by taking them and carrying them firmly! Why the hell are you waiting for an interval to learn to dig a water-ditch for a hawk's outfit in a bear's den?'
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