This is absolutely the case with のぼる and most of the つく’s. There are some つく’s that feel different to me, like 吐く and 突く, where it’s like two words coincidentally ended up sounding the same. But in the other cases, they are just shades of meaning within the same word, so it’s unrealistic to think that each word in a language should have only one precise meaning.
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No they have different pronunciations in Japanese too. It’s called a pitch accent.
Yes, but in the examples OP gave the pitch accent is the same for those words.
着く and 付く
上る and 登る
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There are more listings for つく than there are possible pitch accents for it.
Edit: It’s more clear on ojad
And all three ways of writing のぼる have the same PA.
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I went to grade school in the US, where they speak English natively, and I still had to memorize the “be” verbs. I can still do it to this day:
- am, is, are, was, were
- be, being, been
- have, has, had
- do, does, did
- shall, will, should, would
- may, might, must, can, could
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Just realised I’d never looked “be” up in the dictionary before.
Am now mildly traumatised 
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Ahh right I didn’t know that, but with 登る and 上る it doesn’t matter because they both mean the same thing. With 付く and 着く the context would be so different. You’re not gonna pull up to your house and get confused when your friend says 着いた right?
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Yes, exactly.
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lol have you tried memorizing Portuguese conjugation? To be in Portuguese are in fact 2 verbs: ser and estar. here’s the conjugation: Conjugação do Verbo Ser - Conjugação de Verbos and Conjugação do Verbo Estar - Conjugação de Verbos 
The same verbal chaos is found in French, Spanish, and Italian… Compared to Romance languages, English and Japanese conjugation are a piece of cake.
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What about ケーキが食べられる? Is it true that it can mean both “the cake will be eaten” and “I can eat the cake”?
Yes. But if you mean the potential, in casual speech you can shorten it to 食べれる. Ichidan verbs just don’t have a true potential form.
I can’t speak for Romance languages, but “to be” is a pain on most levels, from conjugation to the range of meanings (it’s simultaneously a copula, an auxilliary verb expressing various aspects/moods, the existence verb and gets used as a suffix). The copular and existence usage is particularly problematic…if you’re saying romance languages are worse, then I’m glad I picked Japanese 
食べられる can mean either, but ケーキが食べられる feels like “the cake will be eaten” to me.
Without more info though, they are both valid meanings.
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Oh, were flexing about conjugations now! (to be)
(be sure to scroll all the way down to the declension of participles)
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If you think that’s bad, look up “set” in an English dictionary…
Almost makes English seem harder until you see how many different contexts a kanji like “当” can be used in and you realize that all languages have this problem haha
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“Set” does have a lot of meanings, but the meanings that “be” has just cause confusion, even for English speakers (a very subtle kind though, which is even worse).
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oh yeah, as a Portuguese native speaker and fluent speaker of French and Spanish, I can assure you that, regarding conjugation, English and Japanese are way easier. If I may ask, what’s your first language?
LOL Finnish is in a completely different level… Conjugation-wise I’d say it’s as bad as Romance languages, but when you add up the declensions, forget about it. A foreigner has no chance to master them. ( I didn’t know that participles in Finnish were also inflected. Thanks for educating me 
)
Please tell Finnish grammarians to start using prepositions instead of inflection. The world will thank you 
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We have the word Ponto in portuguese that can mean anything you want hehehhe
English and Turkish.
Yeah, English mostly just doesn’t conjugate anyway (but that’s not really why to be is a mess).