The figures from the Cambridge Learner Corpus back up what Steve Crowdy
says about learners' mis-spelling of 'pronunciation' (and that may provide
a good indication of the way in which learners prononunce 'pronunciation')
We have a 4-million word error-coded subset in the 15 million words in the
learner corpus. If you look at the 59 examples of the word 'pronunciation'
in the 4 million word error-coded subset it has a 54% mis-spelling rate.
The top three mis-spellings in our sample were these, with their rounded
percentage rate in brackets:
pronounciation (27%)
pronounsiation (5%)
pronaunciation (3%)
prononciation (3%)
As Steve mentioned, there were several other mis-spellings which occurred
only once.
(incidentally, I have worked with several ELT teachers who could not
produce the standard pronunciation of 'pronunciation'. Maybe it was some
kind of 'teacher's block')
At 09:49 AM 7/24/02 +0100, Crowdy, Steve wrote:
>This word has many mispelling variants. The Longman Learners Corpus (around
>11 million words) lists the following spellings of "pronunciation":
>
>pronunciation (frequency 154)
>pronounciation (49)
>prononciation (6)
>pronunication (6)
>pronuciation (4)
>
>Other misspellings in the LLC include: pronuntiation, pronanciation,
>pronuntation, pronuncition, pronunciotion, pronuncation, pronouncition,
>pronounceretion, pronouncation, pronouciation, and pronoucation.
>
>Even in native speaker corpora "pronouciation" does creep in. Looking at a
>large corpus of UK news data, even the hallowed pages of the BBC website
>reveals 10 instances of "pronounciation".
>
>Steve Crowdy
>Longman Dictionaries
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Peter K Tan [mailto:petertan@leonis.nus.edu.sg]
>Sent: 24 July 2002 04:42
>To: CORPORA@HD.UIB.NO
>Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] pronunciation
>
>
>At 10.38 am 24-7-02 +0800, Josephine Lo wrote:
>>Dear all,
>>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 don't have access to Learner Corpora, but it might be worthwhile doing a
>search there. Speaking based on my experience of marking essays from
>Singaporean students, the spelling 'pronounciation' appears to be the
>majority spelling - and they still surprisingly predominate in these days
>of spell-check. (They also pronounce it with the /aU/ diphthong.) Also, I
>find 'maintainance' as well, whereas others like 'renunciation',
>'denunciation' don't occur frequently enough for me to notice a tendency.
>'Annunciation' is more specialised and is typically spelt as such -
>presumably because of its occurrence in Christian contexts.
>
>>Is is possible that the "o" one would make its way through and
>>eventually replace "pronunciation"?
>
>Spelling in English is very conservative. I would imagine that it would
>need more than the spellings of second-language to influence change and it
>is the spelling of Inner Circle speakers that would be crucial. More
>crucially, they would need to change the pronunciation of 'pronunciation' -
>compare this with the spellings 'shew' and 'show' which co-existed for a
>long time before the former waned not too long ago.
>
>Cheers,
>Peter
>
>
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>Pearson Education
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Patrick Gillard
Senior Commissioning Editor
ELT Dictionaries
Cambridge University Press
Direct line: +44 (0)1223 325596
Cambridge Learner's Dictionary (published February 2001)
http://www.cambridge.org/elt/cld
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