Heteronym

I have been a reading machine as of late.  I read Stephen King's 11/22/63, all 3 books of the Hunger Games and now I am finishing The Art of Fielding before I start a new book TBA for Book Club.  I have really only had time to accomplish this much "reading" because I  have been setting my Kindle to Text-to-Speech while I drive my hour commute to and from work each day.  It is a wonderful change of pace from listening to music (the same songs every day for two hours really gets old) and it helps keep me from road rage which is pretty huge for me. Don't worry I still think other drivers are stupid... I just don't think about it as much since I have a story to concentrate on.


Anyway when my Kindle "reads" to me it isn't an Audio book it is just a computer reading the words.  It doesn't really acknowledge any punctuation, nor does it pause between chapters; so really it sounds like one big run on sentence but once you get the rhythm and move past the monotone voice you end up just as engrossed as if you were reading it to yourself.

One thing that has stood out to me is the crazy amount of heteronyms the English language has.  For those of you who are linguistic specialist a heteronyms are words that are written identically but have different pronunciations and meanings.  So for example: live (to have life) and live (to be alive).  These two words are spelled exactly the same but pronounced differently AND have a different meaning.  This is something my Kindle NEVER gets right but that when I would read a sentence on my own I wouldn't think twice about which word I should read. 

Out of curiosity I decided to see how many of these words we actually have in English and good ol' Wikipedia hooked me up.

Check some of my favorites:

abuse  and  abuse

allied  and  allied

alternate  and  alternate

appropriate  and  appropriate

attribute  and  attribute

articulate  and  articulate

axes  and  axes

bass  and  bass

buffet  and  buffet

close  and  close

compact  and  compact

conduct  and  conduct

console  and  console

convict  and  convict

desert  and  desert

dove  and  dove

entrance  and  entrance

invalid  and  invalid

lead  and  lead

live  and  live

minute  and  minute

mobile  and  mobile

moped  and  moped

object  and  object

polish  and  Polish

present  and  present

produce  and  produce

project  and  project

read  and  read

rebel  and  rebel

record  and  record

refuse  and  refuse

sake  and  sake

sewer  and  sewer

subject  and  subject

tear  and  tear

wind  and  wind

wound  and  wound

So just when you think English is totally stupid you will be glad to know that it is possible to have heternoyms in non letter based languages such as Chinese.  Refer to Wiki link above for example.  I'm glad to know us English speakers aren't alone.