Thomas Chan wrote:

> You must be describing a situation similar to what I experienced circa the
> early 80's--I was taught that the likes of "bear" and "bare" were
> "homonyms" (rather than "homophones"), and the ridiculous notion of five
> (or six) vowels in English, occuring in two varieties.

Ca. 1960, we learned (that would be 4th grade) there were three kinds of
word-pairs: synonyoms, antonyms, and homonyms.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...