Homographs: Discussion Points

• How do homographs come to exist?
• Can you suggest additional homographs in English?
• Think about some "graph" words in English or other languages. What units are they composed of?
• Can you suggest additional homographs in (your language of study)?
• Can you suggest words that are both homophones and homographs?
• What indicates the difference of meanings in a pair of homographs? (answer: Very often the stress is the indicator, e.g., noun with initial stress, verb with final stress. Other homographs have a difference in the quality of the vowel, as in "tear"--rip/liquid secreted from the eye.)
• What is the image included in the handouts? (answer: This is the earliest seismograph, invented in China in the second century CE. Made of copper, it consisted of eight dragon heads, each holding a ball in its mouth. When a strong earthquake hit, the ball would fall into the open mouth of a frog standing directly under the dragon, and that would indicate the direction of the earth movement. "Seism" means "earthquake", and the "graph" morpheme refers to the mechanism that records its vibrations).