Homophones
Homophones are two words that sound almost identical, but have different meanings. The difference between homophones and homonyms is slight (the latter can also be spelled the same, called a homograph). These words that sound alike but have different meanings give rise to the Eggcorns, malapropisms mentioned previously. While these can result from any mixture of inattention, lack of education, or striving to sound erudite, a common cause for writers to mistake "fast" for "vast", "airy" for "aerie" is learning the language by hearing rather than reading. My foreign friends who tell me "I love English; I love how it sounds" and then fill their emails with indecipherable cryptic terms also show me they are studying by satellite, not classroom.
posted by Georganna Hancock M.S. | 9:20 AM
1 Comments:
Reading is likely the most important prerequisite to good writing. It helps so many of the rules of grammar and usage become second nature.
I recall a Spanish class in which the topic came up of how "the" is pronounced in English. I knew, without realizing I knew until that moment, that "the" is pronounced one way before a vowel and another way before a consonant. I don't think I learned this from speech, but from a combination of reading and speech, hearing it, and seeing it on the page.
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