flour/flower etc.

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>I still am looking for a case where alternative spellings suggest
>differences in connotation
>rather than denotation, where the connotation is something other than
>"pretentiousness" or "foreignness."

I'm still thinking about it, but someone mentioned "comptroller" already
here recently. I concede it's a borderline case, but I think this
alternative spelling of "controller" is old enough and common enough that
it's lost its "foreign" and "pretentious" connotations -- now it carries
the connotation of "corporate-ness" or "business", I think. I suspect
however that it is usually pronounced with 'mp', and this would tend to
vitiate the example.

On the other side of the coin, there are a lot of alternative
pronunciations used by US medical personnel (parallel to /vaz/ vs. /veis/
'vase' etc.). A frequent although -- I think -- minority pronunciation of
'cervical' among MD's for example is /s at rvaik@l/ with 2nd-syllable stress;
also 'umbilicus' /Vmb at laik@s/ with 3rd-syllable stress -- etc, etc. My
favorite example though is 'centimeter' /sant at mit@r/ (1st-syllable stress)
as if trying to be French: I think this may have been *majority* US MD
usage 20 years ago; my impression is that it is now losing ground to the
normal /sEnt at mit@r/. Certainly these were originally
'pretentious'/'foreign' but one might say that the current connotation
would be 'medical' (does that imply 'pretentious'? (^_^)). [There are
hundreds of other examples, and probably I've forgotten some of the best ones.]

-- Doug Wilson