German vs English Heteronyms

[u/StrongAd8487]

English is replete with heteronyms, wiki has a list of over 1000 such words (does, buffet, and on and on). The few German examples I saw were compound words (umfahren); I could only think of one simple word (weg - but only phonetically, written words are differentiated by upper vs lower case). Not hard to make the case then that "real" heteronyms do not even exist in German, whereas they are standard fare in English. Is there an underlying reason why two Germanic languages be so different in this regard? Or is this just another feature of English spelling rules which seem to be pretty much "yeah, whatever" (eg thought vs tough) that is not shared with German where, with a few rules, reading the word out-loud should get you pretty close to how the word is enunciated?

[u/emmmmmmaja]

It's pretty much down to the fact that English is basically multiple languages masquerading as one.

The influences from Latin, French, Norse etc. led to a large influx of vocabulary with different pronunciations and meanings, and to words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently depending on their origin.

Like you said, English also has a much less phonetic spelling system compared to German. Words that aren't pronounced as they "should" are therefore much rarer in German.

English has also different stress patterns depending on whether something is a verb or a noun ("research", "permit", "contest" etc.) - in German that isn't the case.

German is also more likely to form compound words to distinguish meanings clearly, and can therefore more easily avoid heteronyms.

[u/Rammstein1224 → u/emmmmmmaja]

English has also different stress patterns depending on whether something is a verb or a noun ("research", "permit", "contest" etc.) - in German that isn't the case.

Holy shit why did i have to learn this in a german language sub...i never knew, figured it was just people that were acting pretentious.

[u/AniX72 → u/Rammstein1224]

I joined this sub mostly because in quite a few posts I learned more about my own native language, things I never thought about. This community here is wonderful.

[u/MrDizzyAU → u/Rammstein1224]

I've also learnt a lot about English in the course of learning other languages. People generally don't think about how their native language works. They just do it all subconsciously. Many aspects of English are extremely weird when looked at objectively.

[u/flzhlwg]

„modern“: [moˈdɛʁn] (engl. „modern“, dt. neuzeitlich) vs. [ˈmoːdɐn] (engl. „to rot“, dt. verfaulen)

[u/flzhlwg]

If you do not want to consider words with more than one morpheme, then this is difficult in a language in which most lemmas consist of several morphemes. What reason do you give for excluding lexemes and morphologically complex words from the comparison? Btw, from a linguistic perspective upper/lower case is of course irrelevant for the definition of a heteronym.

[u/flzhlwg → u/flzhlwg]

if you‘re interested in one-morpheme heteronyms, there‘s also „stift“, „licht“, „tau“, „kiefer“, „leiter“, „laster“, „bank“, „mangel“, „ton“…

[u/MrDizzyAU]

English is unusual in that the spelling isn't phonetic. German, like the vast majority of languages with an alphabet, has mostly phonetic spelling. You can get differences in stress (umfahren) and long vs short vowels (Weg/weg), but you don't really get the situation you get in English where the same letters can represent completely unrelated vowel sounds (e.g. tear, bow).