On 9/22/05, Muke Tever <muke(a)frath.net> wrote:
Andrew Dunbar <hippytrail(a)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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