[olliej]

Awww it’s talking about “submarine cables” in the sense of “cables that go under water”, not “cables that are in submarines”.

Which obviously makes more sense, but I was really curious to learn about this new problem I’d never considered about construction of submarines :)

[adrian_b]

This ambiguity is specific to English, where the same word can be used as a noun or as an adjective or as a verb.

In many languages such ambiguities are impossible, because the nouns, verbs and adjectives derived from the same stem use distinct affixes to mark the role of the word.

[olliej]

At least I don’t need to worry about the gender of a submarine or what kind of object it is, when I want to write a sentence about one. People can work out how to pronounce the words I write and therefore what they meant from context :D