It would be clear from context which was intended. English has many homophones, and they don’t seem to cause much difficulty. Is that not your experience with the many existing homophones?
I wouldn’t say that English has ‘many’ homophones. And yes, I think they’re generally very annoying, when they can be used as the same part of speech. There isn’t much confusion between ‘led’ (past tense of ‘to lead’) and ‘lead’ (the heavy metal). However, it always takes a moment to catch up when someone uses ‘right’ as a verb, and I imagine ‘righter’ would be even worse, especially as an obscure jargon term.
We are getting a bit off-topic, so this is my last post in this thread.
I’d argue that this constitutes many (note the restrictions too, which result in excluded entries).
With regard to how noticeable homophones are, it feels to me like there is a priming effect due to the context, which results in the sense that was intended being obvious and coming to mind effortlessly. For example, cents and sense sound the same in some dialects, but I doubt many would even consider interpreting the sound in question as cents if they heard the previous sentence spoken. I think most homophones are like that, most of the time, and that it usually takes effort to even notice them, as when trying to think of a pun. I will grant you though that righter and writer are more alike in terms of their meaning, and thus easier to confuse, but I just wouldn’t consider that sufficient reason to not even consider it as an option.
“righter” is straight out—it sounds like “writer” in spoken English. .
It would be clear from context which was intended. English has many homophones, and they don’t seem to cause much difficulty. Is that not your experience with the many existing homophones?
I wouldn’t say that English has ‘many’ homophones. And yes, I think they’re generally very annoying, when they can be used as the same part of speech. There isn’t much confusion between ‘led’ (past tense of ‘to lead’) and ‘lead’ (the heavy metal). However, it always takes a moment to catch up when someone uses ‘right’ as a verb, and I imagine ‘righter’ would be even worse, especially as an obscure jargon term.
We are getting a bit off-topic, so this is my last post in this thread.
I’d argue that this constitutes many (note the restrictions too, which result in excluded entries).
With regard to how noticeable homophones are, it feels to me like there is a priming effect due to the context, which results in the sense that was intended being obvious and coming to mind effortlessly. For example, cents and sense sound the same in some dialects, but I doubt many would even consider interpreting the sound in question as cents if they heard the previous sentence spoken. I think most homophones are like that, most of the time, and that it usually takes effort to even notice them, as when trying to think of a pun. I will grant you though that righter and writer are more alike in terms of their meaning, and thus easier to confuse, but I just wouldn’t consider that sufficient reason to not even consider it as an option.