Quoting Patrik (under a different subject heading):
One thing we also have are two words spelled the same, but pronounced differently that means different things.
Example (in Swedish):
kista [chi:sta] : A suburb of Stockholm, where lots of IT industry is located
kista [chista] : A coffin
This is a perfect illustration of the concern that attaches to homographs. The textbook definition of that term is, "two different words in a language that are spelled the same." If we clarify that in the basic terms of our own discussion, we might add, "written with the same sequence of abstract characters and instantiated with the same sequence of glyphs." The two words Patrik uses are normally disambiguated by an upper-case initial letter in the first of them -- "Kista” -- but that device is not available in IDNA2008. It could otherwise be argued that the upper-case distinction means that "Kista” and "kista” are not true homographs in the textbook sense, but in the discussion of IDNs the extra degree of freedom is useful. Since a label has no intrinsic attribute of language and there is no protocol restriction on the number of scripts that may appear in it, it is also be possible to write "kista” using a Cyrillic, rather than a Latin final letter. That gives "kistа”, and since the CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A and the LATIN SMALL LETTER A are commonly represented with the same glyph, the Swedish and the hybrid strings are visually identical. Not confusable -- identical. If we are comfortable in freeing the term "homograph” from the requirement that it applies to words in the same language, and are further willing to drop the requirement of the objects of comparison being words at all, then "kista” and "kistа” may also be termed homographs. This new sense of that term has become deeply entrenched in the discussion of IDNs but I would like to call it into question. By using it as a general descriptor for several different forms of the variance that we are addressing, we are obscuring pivotal distinctions among them. I urgently suggest that we expand our descriptive terminology with the term "homoglyph” to designate situations such as the one used in the Cyrillic/Latin illustration above. Two sequences of identical glyphs used to represent different sequences of code points can and do appear in the IDN space. There is no attribute either of script uniformity or language imposed on them. The separate labeling of them as homoglyphs allows for their immediate differentiation from cases where there really is a homographic concern in the accepted textbook sense. Establishing this distinction may prove of particular utility when focusing on what may be the most urgent issue confronting us. That is the one that arises when two users with identically labeled keyboards, typing the same sequence of abstract characters, producing the same sequence of displayed glyphs, have nonetheless generated two different sequences of code points. /Cary /Cary