not, however, help in cases where the words are of the same grammatical gender.

Moreover, grammatical gender may serve to distinguish homophones. It is a quite common phenomenon in language development for two phonemes to merge, thereby making etymologically distinct words sound alike. In languages with gender distinction, however, these word pairs may still be distinguishable by their gender. For example, French ("pot") and ("skin") are homophones , but disagree in gender: le pot vs. la peau.