Why English doesn’t have diacritics to distinguish the different words with different meanings.?
What are the words in English with two different meanings?
For example “present” can be interpreted as the tense when pronounced /preznt/ or as a synonym of “demonstrate” when /prizent/
Other examples from the top of my head: “read”, “live”.
In English I don’t think I have seen that in any other language. In most languages you can’t decide the spelling of a word by hearing it, but you call articulate it correcly when you’re reading it. To do neither of those things in English, it seems that you can’t do either of those.
Did English have any accent marks? If yes, could they be put into sentence? What were the causes of the film being called “In the End”?
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Your premise is wrong. Homographs that are not homophones exist in a great many languages, and in a great variety of writing systems. Germanic, Slavic, Sinitic; Latin, Cyrillic, Hanzi, have you name it…
To distinguish lead from lead, from, аu043cu043eu043a from аu043cu043eu043a, Heroin from Heroin you have to rely on context. Why can’t some languages have stress marks or diacritics? When
there’s not enough context, all bets are off, but keep your mind that it is not some weird exception, but rather the default situation. Any sequence of characters and symbols in which we write is free to have as many different meanings as people choose to give it, and is thus prone to being ambiguous with not enough context provided. (And remember how there are complete homonyms, where not just the spelling but also the pronunciation are identical. Yet everyone makes do with them just fine.)
Present vs. present is an example of an initial-stress-derived noun, which are extremely common in English. What would be the main problem with homographs in particular in which one is a noun and the other is a verb. Of course you’ll need very little context to tell what part of speech you’re looking at.
As to read, it actually nicely demonstrates another problem still: we probably have the pair of homographs because otherwise we’d have a pair of different homographs. What was the thing wrong when past-tense read actually used to be “red”, but this in turn opposed an adjective red. All prior questions you ask are welcome.
* And of course at the extreme end of this spectrum you have systems like Japanese, where every single kanji have two readings, by Design, so as a complete layman I can’t possibly tell how to read anything, until some kind person comes along and spells it out for me in hiragana. What will happen if the system goes on to outlive me?
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