Interlingual Homograph
An interlingual homograph is a word that occurs in more than one written language, but which has a different meaning or pronunciation in each language. For example word "done" (pronounced /dʌn/) is an adjective in English, a verb in Spanish (present subjunctive form odonar and a noun in Czech (vocative singular form odon pronounced /ˈdonɛ/). A ''homograph'' is a word that is written the same as another word, but which (usually) has a different meaning. '' Interlingual'' means "spanning multiple languages". In some cases, the identical spelling of a word in two languages is coincidental; in other cases, it is because they descend from the same ancestor word. Words that come from the same ancestor are called ''cognates''. Another way of describing interlingual homographs is to say that they are ''orthographically identical'', since a language's orthography describes the rules for writing the language: spelling, diacritics, capitalization, hyphenation, word dividers, etc. See also ...
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Word
A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition. Some specific definitions of the term "word" are employed to convey its different meanings at different levels of description, for example based on phonological, grammatical or orthographic basis. Others suggest that the concept is simply a convention used in everyday situations. The concept of "word" is distinguished from that of a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of language that has a meaning, even if it cannot stand on its own. Words are made out of at leas ...
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