On 9/22/05, Muke Tever muke@frath.net wrote:
Andrew Dunbar hippytrail@gmail.com wrote:
The etymology is also different.
Not really. I don't know about the languages I don't speak (i.e. everything apart from English, Japanese, French and a little Latin), but in general the spelling has little or nothing to do with the etymology.
Sometimes one spelling is definitely known to be derived from another and both remain in use in various places. For instance the Spanish word for "peanut" was borrowed from Nahuatl in Mexico as "cacahuate" but when it was later borrwed into Spain itself it became "cacahuete". It would be a shame to not have a way to record such things in the cases we do know them.
Indeed, but hopefully the area of the entry where spellings are given will be able to contain notes describing the who/what/where/why/when of the spelling--tho thus far all I've heard about is the who, i.e. dialect and so- called authorities--and it won't have to be lumped in with the etymology, whose job is to explain the etymon or etyma of a word and shouldn't have to touch on spelling (unless perhaps to explain why a certain spelling came to be, but even that could be handled by an annotation to the spelling itself).
I think either place for notation of spelling variants is valid but the proposed UW way makes the connection explicitly in the data rather than in the text of the notation. This means easier analysis by computer - which will be a good thing with a very large and structured dictionary.
I don't agree with the "authority" concept. Or maybe it's just the chosen name for the concept I find unsettling. I would have chosen "orthography" before reading Jim's comments on orthography vs. spelling. For instance I would've thought in the case of German that "the pre-1998 German orthography" would be a valid concept. If I substituted the word "spelling" in this phrase it sounds like it refers to a specific word rather than the whole language. Maybe "spelling standard" works better for Jim?
Another thing to think about is that changes in spelling happen for various reasons. The -our in English was inspired by the French of the time. But many others reflect things such as pronunciation changes, re-analysis of how the word was formed, or differing pronunciations in different communities. So while saying "spelling isn't directly related to etymology" is true, I think it's quite a bit less than the whole truth also.
Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
*Muke!
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