Homographs, Homonyms, Heteronyms

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you? My name is Jeff Parthen, and I’m a junior high band director from Lafayette, Indiana.

All right. Well, welcome, Jeff.

Yeah, glad to have you on the show, and thank you for working with the kids. You’re making the world better.

Oh, well, thank you. They’re fun kids. We have a good time.

What can we do for you?

Well, we just had a program, my May concert, and I wanted my kids to be involved with the Leonard Bernstein at 100 celebration. It’s kind of a worldwide festival of Bernstein’s music. And so one of my groups played some Bernstein.

But there’s another composer with the same spelling. His name is Elmer Bernstein. And he’s just as brilliant and a genius as Bernstein. So I thought I’d play some Bernstein as well as Bernstein.

So I wanted to do some kind of a cross-curricular thing. So I looked up to see if I could find if there was an English term for different pronunciations of the same spelling. And I came up with a couple, and I put the word out to my language arts faculty, and they were undecided as to which one it was.

So some of them thought it was a homograph, and some of them thought it was a heteronym.

Ooh, interesting.

And I’m not sure, so I thought you guys might know. And I might suggest that it’s a homonym.

Oh.

Let me see if I can summarize this. You’ve got two composers, Bernstein and Bernstein.

Right.

They’re different names for different people. They’re spelled the same but pronounced differently, right?

That’s correct.

All right. So they’re definitely homonyms, which means they have different meaning and same spelling.

Okay. They’re definitely homographs because they have the same spelling and because they may or may not, but it’s fine, that they refer to two different people because they’re spelled the same. That’s all that’s required for a homograph, same spelling, regardless of meaning, regardless of pronunciation.

And then heteronym, that’s the one where I kind of have a difference of opinion with your language arts teachers. Hetero, remember, means not the same. It’s opposite of homo, which is the same. And they have the same spelling but different meaning, maybe a heteronym, because it depends whether or not you’re counting the name as the thing it’s referring to or the whole mix of spelling plus pronunciation.

So I don’t know. Definitely a homograph, definitely a homonym. How about that?

That sounds great.

Okay. And I would go with homograph just because it’s really the only thing that matters if they’re spelled the same. But what you’re trying to do is capture, spell the same, and pronounce differently, right?

Right, yes.

Okay. And I have like four or five other terms I’m not going to bring into this.

No, let’s leave them out.

But homonym or homograph will work just fine. I love the idea that you’re doing Bernstein and Bernstein.

I do too. It’s a weird thing about the Steinstein names is each family has its own pronunciation tradition, and you just have to learn them to know which is which.

Yeah, there’s no real rule. And it’s interesting, in my research on this, they knew each other. They were both kind of in the business, but one was Bernstein East and one was Bernstein West.

I like that. It reminds me of the President’s Roosevelt or the President’s Roosevelt.

Exactly, yeah. They both had their own pronunciation traditions for the family name.

Okay. Jeff, thank you for calling and good luck. Send us some music if anything turns out okay.

Yeah, I think it’s a cool concert.

Yeah, it was a good time.

Thank you.

All right, take care now.

Thanks, Jeff.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, you know, this show’s about a lot of things related to language. It’s not just word origins or old stories about language. Sometimes it’s the day-to-day stuff that happens as you go about your work. Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.