At 10.38 am 24-7-02 +0800, Josephine Lo wrote:
>I'm interested in the word "pronunciation" since recently I noticed
>that it is quite commonly misspelled as "pronounciation". Is this a
>common mistake only among non-native speakers?
I did a search on Google, and got the following counts:
pronunciation: 953,000 (only English: 472,000)
pronounciation: 36,000 (only English: 32,700)
both pronunciation and pronounciation: 5,320
pronounce (only English): 205,000
pronunce (only English): 905
To see the changes over time, I checked the Google newsgroup
archive (formerly DejaNews) for English-language messages.
Google Groups 1983:
-------------------
pronunciation: 72
pronounciation: 40
Google Groups 1988:
-------------------
pronunciation: 90
pronounciation: 33
Google Groups 2002:
-------------------
pronunciation: 28,800
pronounciation: 4,430
It appears that the frequency of the error has not increased
over time. I would expect the error to occur quite frequently,
since "pronunciation" is not a regular morphological derivation
from "pronounce", but must be learned as an exception.
The following is an easily readable introduction to language
change:
Language change: Progress or decay? 3rd edition (1st edition1981).
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
regards,
Gregor Erbach
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dr. Gregor Erbach http://purl.org/net/gregor/
Saarland University http://www.uni-sb.de/
Computational Linguistics Dept. http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/
Project COLLATE http://collate.dfki.de/
Tel. +49 (681) 302-5354 mailto:gor@acm.org
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