758-1: Feedback, notes and comments

Idioticon Peter Judge reminds us that idiom is another word that traces its ancestry back to classical Greek idios for something private (its equivalent in French, idiotisme, shows the historical link with our idiot).

Homophones Following up my mention of these in the piece last week about punt, Gerry Foley pointed out that other languages have it worse: "The incidence of these words in English pales in comparison with Mandarin. I just looked up the word he which sounds like English her with a rising tone. There are at least 25 words with this sound, most represented by distinct ideograms, having meanings as diverse as: river, small box, Holland, what, lotus. There are many further meanings for the word he that carry one of the other three tones of the language. Many words in Mandarin carry similar numbers of homophones; yet, as with English speakers, this doesn't lead to a lot of confusion. Interestingly, one of the arguments made against changing written Chinese to a phonetic system based on Roman letters is that the traditional ideograms (of which there are many thousands) help to distinguish all these homophones in writing."