A lesson on homophones

byverazhelvis

3.1K followers

9 years ago

English is certainly a tricky language because of its idiomatic character,polysemantic character of its words...

its spelling...

A lot of confusion to it add homophones...

There are lots and lots of homophones in English.Many jokes in English are based on this language phenomenon. It's not possible to translate such jokes into other languages because the essence and the hilarious charecter of the joke will not be retained while translating.

-You see, darling, this costs only twenty dollars. Good buy.

-Yes, Good bye, twenty dollars.

-He is an idol of our family.

-Yes, idle for twenty years.

To check your knowledge of homophones and just to have fun I suggest playing the game I use in my English classes while teaching homophones. The game is called Teakettle and goes as follows. We take two homophones, that is the words that sound the same but mean different things and put them into a sentence , or two sentences.(The sentenes should be contextual enough.) When done, we replace them with the word Teakettle.Those playing need to guess what the words are from the structure of the sentence and its context. Many of my students like this game a lot.

We do it like this:

A sailor went to sea to see what he could see.

A sailor went to Teakettle to Teakettle what he could Teakettle.

One more example:

The sun has set.

What's your son's name?

The Teakettle has set.

What's your Teakettle's name?

Now here are some Teakettles. Send your answers to this post.

1) I wonder Teakettle the Teakettle will be fine.

2 At lunch , he Teakettle Teakettle hamburgers and fries.

3)I saw a Teakettle at halloween.

Teakettle colour do you like best?

4)The Teakettle jumped over a log.

She is my Teakettle friend.

5)Sam has a Teakettle on Teakettle

6)Teakettle do you Teakettle water wings?

7) Teakettle Teakettle me.

8)How much can Teakettle feet Teakettle?

9)The Teakettle is about right. It's Teakettle move.

10)-How shall I make my Teakettle?

-I just need Teakettle and quiet.

11) She has green Teakettles.

Teakettle have brown Teakettles.

12)I Teakettle my hair.

My hair Teakettle.

13) I Teakettle it was a Teakettle film.

14) I need to have my Teakettle cut.

The Teakettle runs faster than the turtle.

You are very much welcome also, to place your own homophone riddles in this post for the rest of us(and me, too) to do them...:)

And here is how it can go in case we don't learn homophones...