"Ken Blake" wrote in message
news
On Thu, 12 Jul 2018 02:55:33 +0100, John wrote:

And then there are the millions of homonyms, like "rhos" and "rose",
"there" and "their", "ewer" and "your" and so many other wonderful
tools for making puns.

Interesting that you say "ewer" and "your" are homonyms. They aren't
to me.

Yes, I'd pronounce "ewer" as YOU-er, whereas I'd pronounce "your", "yore"
[long ago, in former times] and "Ure" [river in north Yorkshire]
identically.

Using homonyms to define pronunciation is always a problem if people either
do or don't pronounce the sample words the same, depending on accent. My
parents have a dictionary which uses different phonetic symbols, with
examples of their use in typical words. It uses different symbols for the
(final) vowel sound in "fur", "fir" and "transfer", whereas I make no
distinction between these; evidently the writers of the dictionary do.