performance/preformance

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

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.>>