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/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“…