Does any language besides English have homophones?Ben Waggoner :
There ’s the old jest about the Spaniard who had invited an American to his home , but his English was n’t very sound , so he quickly attend up the English combining weight for the Spanish run-in that he wanted to say . . . and when his invitee come through the threshold , the Spaniard smiled and read , “ Between , and drink a chair ! ”
The jest is that the poor Spanish fella meant to say , “ issue forth in , and have a seat!”—¡Entre , y tome una silla!—but he coalesce up the homophonesentre , meaning " between,“andentre , the polite , third somebody singular imperative ofentrar , which mean " to enter . ” ( The other part of the joke is thattomarcan mean either “ to take ” or “ to drink ” ; that ’s not so much a homophone as a word with a spot of a lexical spread . )
A bit of Wiktionary work to refresh my memory of Russian yieldedмой , moj , which imply either “ my [ masc . ] ” or “ wash ! ” [ 2nd person sg . imperative of мыть ] . From the same fore we getмыло , mylo , which mean either “ soap ” or “ it [ neut . ] washed ” [ neuter sg . past ofмыть ] . And then there’sмат , mat , which can mean either “ mate ” or “ curse Word ; obscenities”—the first is take over from Persian ( as is “ checkmate ” , fromshah mat , “ the king is dead ” ) , while the second number from the almost - but - not - quite - homophoneмать , “ female parent . ” The set phrase for “ to use profanity ” ( ругаться матом ) etymologically think of “ to say lewd things about someone ’s mother . ”
Then there ’s the most famous Russian homophone , мир , mir , meaning “ peace treaty ” or “ world . ” They were identify in spelling before 1920 , with the word for “ world ” spelledмір , but the Soviet spelling reforms made them indistinguishable , as inМир миру , mir miru,“peace to the populace ! , ” a common Soviet slogan . ( Purely to plod this result out , I might add thatмирin the sense of “ peace ” may go back to the Indo - Iranian god of contract and social order , Mithra . Or so some have argued . I ’ve also seen it said that bothмирandMithracome from a PIE root meaning “ to bind”,*mei- . )
in conclusion , I looked up a few homophone in Old Norse , with which I have a passing familiarity :
This could be a plot of land point inVikings . ImagineRagnar shouting “ Damn it , Floki , I narrate you that what we had to hash out was offering the battle - slain to Odin by use up them and carrying them unwaveringly ! Why the hellhole are you waiting for an interval to see to dig a water - ditch for a hawk ’s outfit in a bear ’s den ? ”
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