Nope, we know. I do wish our English classes in high school and middle school at least tried to explain why it is such an oddball, and how it evolved over time. I was able to guess some of it but had to take a linguistics course in college before it stopped annoying me whenever I thought about it.
I read once about a blind guy who didn’t realize homophones and near-homophones could be different words until he started learning to spell as an adult, kind of the inverse of your situation and an exaggerated version of what most native speakers experience.
Well, it would be very difficult to have true homophones in Italian. At least I can’t think of any, nor how they would be spelled. Multiple meanings, sure. That’s what happens when languages write in an orthography designed for their own sounds. Mandarin, the other language I’ve ever taken, is the other far end of the spectrum when spoken. But the writing is unambiguous, and spoken idioms and many cultural practices are frequently based on homophones.
