[Lexicog] English homonyms

[Benjamin Barrett]

I think Japanese and perhaps Korean have far more homophones than English.
Looking up koukou on a hunch in one Japanese dictionary, I find 24 different
lexical entries, each with different characters. Because Korean has
generally abandoned character use, differentiation is probably harder than
in Japanese.

A large number of homophones is a problem for a dictionary. I know I grow
exasperated looking through a series of homophones in my Korean dictionary,
trying to figure out which one might be the one I'm looking for. My Cosmos
J-K dictionary partially solves this by putting common words in larger font
size than less common words.

Any other ideas on making the search easier for the user?

Benjamin Barrett

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Kim Blewett [mailto:kim_blewett at sil.org]
>
>Referring to John Roberts' list of homophones. Great list. I
>agree that all languages have some degree of homophony, but
>English is likely the most extreme example of different
>spellings for homophones. In many languages the list of
>homophones would look much more like John's second list, in
>which word breaks in the orthography, or at least morpheme
>breaks, distinguish the pairs.




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