LINGUIST List 3.703

Fri 18 Sep 1992

Disc: Reanalyses

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. mark, Re 3.701 Reanalyses
2. (ark, reanalysis
3. Herb Stahlke, Reanalyses
4. Ian MacKay, reanalyses
5. David Stampe, 3.701 Reanalyses
6. Claudia Brugman, Re: 3.701 Reanalyses
7. Michael Kac, Re: 3.677 Reanalyses
8. , 3.701 Reanalyses
9. "Sue.Gass", Reanalysis

In 3.701 Alexis Manaster Ramer argues that <imput> is (or might
well be) the "natural" spelling of "input" by someone who has
heard the word without seeing it written, regardless of whether
they understand its morphology. In support of this argument he
introduces the analogy:

 > Presumably, speakers of Dutch have no trouble connecting
 > the form HUIS 'house' with its plural 'HUIZEN', even
 > though the former indicates in its spelling the final
 > devoicing of the /z/. The same would be true with the
 > English example under discussion.

But Dutch is loaded with cases of voiced medial fricatives
(before a suffix such as -EN) corresponding to voiceless final
ones, reflected in the very regular, surface-based spelling.
Dutch speaker/readers have plenty of examples to learn it from at
an early age. How frequent in English are transparent cases of

 m / _[labial] : n / elsewhere ?

Not very. (Latin /in/ prefixes for 'not', 'in', and
'[intensive]' are not natively transparent to English-speakers,
as witness the teaching of their underlying unity in textbooks of
Latin, linguistics, and high-school English.)

English spelling, unlike that of Dutch, tends to preserve
morphology, even obscure and non-productive morphology, rather
than reflect surface phonology (contributing to its notorious
difficulty). And therefore a case of a heard word being spelled
in accordance with pronunciation rather than morphology,
especially when the morphology is recent and productive and based
on common morphemes, is evidence that the writer was unaware of
the morphology.

 Mark A. Mandel
 Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
 320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA

I thought all children said asposed for supposed. All the children I
have known do/did. And pisghetti for spaghetti (except for my two
younger children, products of the yuppie life, who invariably call it
"pasta").

Here's another one: last night I was reading "The Berenstain Bears
Forget Their Manners" to my 3 year old son. In the text, Papa Bear
calls a driver he has just bunked [sic; another kid term] into a
pinhead or some such. Sister Bear says, "That's name calling, Papa."
When the two driver bears get out of their cars for a confrontation,
my son asked, "What does Name Calling say to Papa Bear?"

The misreading of _misled_ as `mizzled' rather than mis-led is a classic;
I've heard so many people tell me they've read mizzled instead of misled
that now I do it too, every time I see the word in print. One of the
standard folk etymologies for Gringo supposes it to be a reanalysis
of the beginning of the song, "Green grow the lilacs, oh," which is
supposed to be what Spanish speakers heard English soldiers singing.
Maybe it's even true. There are certainly borrowings that fit the
mold: the French for transom is _le vasistas_, apparently the question
Germans in Alsace and Lorraine asked for the window over the door, and
the French thought they were kindly naming it for them. The peasant
hair style called _quichenot_ in Poitou is supposed to come from
French women resisting the advances of English invaders of La
Rochelle by saying a heavily accented Poitevin version of "kiss not."

And more: Gladly, the cross-eyed bear. Blessed art thou, a monk
swimming. Ramona Quimby, another hero of children's lit, says the
phrase from the Star Spangled Banner as "Dawnzerly Light."

Someone in the word-game business must have collected these sorts of
things in abundance.

Dennis Baron debaronuiuc.edu
Dept. of English office: 217-333-2392
University of Illinois 217-333-9568
608 S. Wright St fax: 217-333-4321
Urbana IL 61801

I've run into a number of reanalyses in northwest Ohio, especially the
Toledo area, although these may well be more widespread:

	"viadock" for "viaduct"
	"to frosten" ([t] pronounced) for "to frost"
 "incidence" for "incident"

and idiomatically

	"to look one's nose down at" for "to look down one's nose at"

but I'm not sure that the last three are reanalyses of the sort this list
has been discussing.

Herb Stahlke
Ball State University

A notorious example of reanalysis that involves orthographic influence is the
term "chaise lounge". Presumably, the descriptive French expression "chaise
longue" (literally, 'long chair') was reanalysed, due to orthographic
similarity, familiarity, and semantic reasons, to "chaise lounge".
n

Ian MacKay (imackayacadvm1.uottawa.ca)

In a brief clip I saw recently on tv, some little girls were playing
Ring around the Rosie, singing
		Aa shit,
		Aa shit,
		We all fall down.

Message 6: Re: 3.701 Reanalyses

Dare I post this? It's not meant to be sacrilegious. When I was a kid
I thought "holy infant, so tender and mild" in _Silent night_ was "holy
imbecile, tender and mild". I just assumed that "imbecile" had undergone
pejoration since the composition of the hymn--folk-etymologized it as
something like `innocent' (one of the properties of Jesus that I'd learned
about at some length was that he was innocent, though not naive.).

This doesn't hold a candle to "elemental B", though.

Claudia Brugman

Message 7: Re: 3.677 Reanalyses

Susan Fischer mentions the possibility of print-based misanalyses. One which
crops up occsionally is the pronunciation of *misled* as [mayzld] or [mIzld].
I've also heard *carousel* read as [kerawzl] (read the *e* as a schwa).

John D. Macdonald's Travis Mcgee series includes a novel called *The Green
Ripper*, evidently after a child's attempt at *The Grim Reaper* -- but I
don't know if the error is authentic.

Complementary to *duck tape* one sometimes hears *try a different tact*; I've
also heard *tenure tract*. That leads me to a question about something one
hears from sports commentators: sometimes you'll hear a team described as
having trouble getting untracked. I've always wondered whether that's based
on a misanalysis of *getting on track* but I don't know.

An acquaintance who teaches freshman composition reports having read a student
paper in which the author, bemoaning the highly competitive tenor of contempo-
rary life, comments that it's a doggy dog world out there.

Michael Kac

 A B Sea Prayer

(provoked by a previous listing)

 Ah, be sea! To ye effigy! Each eye shake! Elemental Peak!
 You roar esse! To you we double! You wax wide, sea!

I can't resist putting in my own example of reanalysis. When I was a child I
must have heard people ask me the question "Do you have to urinate?" since
for a while I frequently said "I have to my inate". Sue Gass