indice

[Charles Doyle]

Back in 1979 I published a tiny note about this subject: "An Indice of the Times," _American Speech_ 54:278. So it was happening at least that far back--that is, "indice" pronunced [IndIs] or perhaps [Ind at s] (or perhaps the barred-I pronunciation in between, which I don't know how to write). John Algeo suggests the parallel of "process" [prosIs] back-formed from the affected pronunciation of the plural [prosIsiz].

--Charlie
_____________________________________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 08:15:56 -0700
>From: "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
>Subject: Re: indice
>
>On Aug 22, 2008, at 6:05 PM, Herb Stahlke wrote:
>
>> Jacques Berlinerblau, in his On Faith column on today's Washington Post web site, writes, "Yet as an indice of some of the lines of attack that the McCain camp is employing it is of great interest."...
>
>Bill Walsh blog on the word:
>   http://theslot.blogspot.com/2006/03/ice-ice-baby.html
>
>(Walsh lists "tamale" as a similar example, and also notes the spelling "lense" for "lens".)
>
>googling on {"an indice"} gets a fair number of examples, from mathematics, social science, and various other domains.
>
>> ... Grant Barrett and Martha Barnett discuss the word on "A Way with Words" and find that it's used mostly in finance.  One emailer on their site writes, "The discussion on index and indece [sic] was interesting. It surprised me when the indice term was indicated as not being real, (my unabridged dictionary agreed on it not being real, durn it) I have commonly used index as a fixed number or the result of a study, and indice as the immeadiate or approximate value, which when recorded would become an index. Index had more impact than indice. I will probably continue using the two terms, but, hopefully will only use "index" in reports or
>> presentations."
>
>nice example of semantic differentiation of variants.
>
>>  He says that he thinks he picked the term up thirty years ago when he was working with some French engineers.
>
>i've heard the word for some time, but always pronounced /Ind at si], with primary stress on the first syllable and secondary stress on the third.  it's hard to see how you could get this from the french >*pronunciation* of (the french word) "indice" (rather than by back- formation from english "indices").  on the other hand, the french >*spelling* might conceivably be pronounced /Ind at si/ (though this is a bit of a stretch).
>
>arnold

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org