[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