performance/preformance

[Bob Fitzke]

Let me toss in a three more that grate on this layman's ears:

Renumeration for remuneration

statisics or satistics for statistics

tempature for temperature

Bob

RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:

> I'm dubious that anything but phonology is very much as work here. It seems
> to me to go both ways (just like BIRD/BRID). I hear "pervention" as much as
> "prevention"; cf. also "pervaricate," "perliminary"--even "February" becomes
> "Feburary" as well as "Febuary."
>
> <<By my reasoning, no one would say 'per-game'...I was wondering whether the
> transparent PRE- prefix is prefered over the semantically opaque PER- thing
> that looks like a prefix.  I think English speakers do have a sense that
> PER- and CON- and other fossilized latinate prefixes are prefixes (this
> becomes very clear in the morphology section of the intro to linguistics
> class), but they have a clearer sense that PRE- is a prefix, since it's
> still productive.  So I was suggesting that 'prehaps' the people who
> metathesize these sounds are motivated by morphology analogy, not articulatory
> ease or whatever.>>