spotted in the wild...

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:01 PM -0400 5/8/05, Erik Hoover wrote:
>I'm no prescriptivist, but I'm thinking that you mean homophone when
>describing the similarities of 'seated' and 'seeded', rather than
>homonym.

No, actually I meant homonym, although they're obviously (also)
homophones.  Here's the OED under "homonym":

1. a. The same name or word used to denote different things.    b.
Philol. Applied to words having the same sound, but differing in
meaning.

(No mention of spelling.)

And here's the AHD:

1. One of two or more words that have the same sound and often the
same spelling but differ in meaning,

The literature on homonymy (for example, the extensive recent
discussion in the psycholinguistic journals on children's resistance
to hyponyms) typically disregards orthographic distinctions, so that
even though "seeded" and "seated" are not homographs, they're
homonyms.   This has been true for some time, as in the classic
treatise by Edna Rees Williams, _The Conflict of Homonyms in English_
(Yale U. Press, 1944), which does not distinguish between homonyms
that have the same spelling and those that don't.

I'm no prescriptivist either, so as far as I'm concerned you're free
to use the term in a more specific sense in which homophones that are
not homographs are not homonyms, but that's not the standard use of
the term in linguistics.

Larry



>
>On May 8, 2005, at 8:47 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>>Subject:      spotted in the wild...
>>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>--------
>>
>>...but not a new item for the bestiary; there's a nice treatment in
>>the eggcorn database.
>>
>>In a student paper I just read, a reference is made to "deep-seeded
>>racism".
>>
>>As the discussion at
>>http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/index.php?s=seeded&submit=Search points
>>out, the eggcorn actually is more transparent in this case than the
>>original source "deep-seated" is, and of course the two are homonyms
>>in most varieties of U.S. English.
>>
>>Larry
>>
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