Not enough words to go round

Vocabulary, is what we need my friend
Vocabulary, is what we need
Vocabulary, is what we need, my friend
but there are not enough words to go round ...

The other day - for a reason that now escapes me, but definitely made sense at the time - I had to explain to my daughter of five what homonyms are. I find it very useful, explaining things to children, because you have to reduce things to their essence without oversimplifying. In the case of homonyms, my explanation basically came down to the observation that we do not have enough words to describe everything, so we often use the same word to mean very different things. The examples I gave to her included the Dutch word "zei" ("said"), which is pronounced exactly the same way as the pronoun "zij" (which means "she" or "her"). Luckily, she didn't ask why adults are so stupid as not to have language where each word means only one thing, and there is a word for each thing, because that would have been impossible to explain.

Take for example two very important words: "rule" and "law". Both can be used to mean "something that naturally happens more or less the same way repeatedly", such as in "laws of nature", or - more often in the context of human society - a behavior we would like to either impose or penalize, such as in "rules of conduct". How is it that we cannot invent some words without this built-in ambiguity? Or the word right, for example, which can mean quite a few different, including "correct" (as in "I am right") and "something you can lay a claim to" ("I have the right to remain silent"). And the list goes on and on. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the 5000 most common words in the English language probably have an average of 2-3 meanings each, or more. The average is presumably a lot lower for specialist jargon, but even there, you will find this problem: the word "pitch", for example, has three different meanings in aviation alone.

So how do go about carving a masterpiece of meaning, if words are such blunt tools? The answer, of course, is by creating context, or combining words with other words. This does not completely eradicate the possibility of error, but it does reduce it significantly. In the case of the example I gave to my daughter, for example, I had to admit the theoretical possibility that someone hearing "hij zei" ("he said") might actually understand "he zij" ("he she"), but in most cases, the second combination of words wouldn't mean anything, and listeners would reject it as a possibility without even really thinking about it.

To be continued ....