¿ ¿ ¿ amongst

[Laurence Horn]

>Aha--I wonder if it's one of those words teachers like to drill into kids,
>so that it comes out in college essays but not generally in
>speech.  Thanks, David!

I've always assumed it's the British (or non-U.S.) variant, like
"whilst" vs. "while".  But maybe it's not the same split.

Larry

>At 02:33 PM 7/25/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>>DARE has only _amongst (hands of) them_ and _amongst you_ .  The latter
>>is chiefly central Atlantic.
>>
>>It does not appear to be very frequent as measured by the Brown corpus
>>or AH Word Frequency Book (both somewhat dated).  In the latter, it is
>>recorded as appearing in 3rd grade reading.  It does not appear in the
>>World Book Word List (formerly [?] used by the editors of World Book
>>Encyclopedia).  In the Brown corpus it appears somewhere in the
>>vicinity of 14,000 to 16,000 (p. 41 in the Rank List); the alphabetical
>>arrangement within the rank list makes an exact position difficult.
>>Thorndike's _Teacher's Word Book of 20,000 Words_ (1931) puts amongst
>>in the 6th thousand.  It appears three time in James Joyce's Ulysses.
>>Needless to say, it's not very frequent.  Very unscientific as googling
>>is, when googled _amongst_ comes up with 3,430,000 hits; searched in
>>Google News the number of hits is 3,340.  Among, respectively appears
>>33,600,000 and 51,000.  That's a closer comparison than I would have
>>expected, I think.
>>
>>Regards,
>>David
>>
>>barnhart at highlands.com