performance/preformance

[Dennis R. Preston]

They don;t grate on me; I love em all, but I love sadistics the bes.

dInIs

>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.>>


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736