Parse this: Pentagon fields new Language Corps

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On May 15, 2007, at 6:31 AM, Jim Landau s wrote:

> OT: re "dimunition", does that list of words like "nuptual",
> "intravenious" include the pair "aluminum/aluminium"?

no, because these are competing coinings, not involving (unconscious)
reshaping. Davy chose the name "aluminum" in 1812 (and that became
the U.S. usage), but others rejected that in favor of the name
"aluminium", as in the OED's first cite, also from 1812:

1812 Q. Rev. VIII. 72 Aluminium, for so we shall take the liberty of
writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less
classical sound.

this became the British usage.

> OT: on the subject of hard-to-pronounce words, next month I will be
> taking a class in CPR/defibrillators, and  neither I nor the MD
> organizing the class can get that word right.  I have more sympathy
> now
> for our County Executive when he takes credit for putting
> "defibulators"
> in every police car.

ah, now *this* one belongs on the list.  lots and lots of hits for
it.  and an explicit discussion by Bob Kennedy on phonoloblog last year:

http://camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog/index.php/2006/03/24/defibulator/
defibulator

— Bob Kennedy @ 1:40 pm
Last night Jon Stewart cracked a Cheney-heart-condition-joke with
“defibulators” as the punch line. Now I’m not one to judge, but I had
to point it out. Despite the 29K ghits that “defibulator” gets, and
the 12K ghits that “defibulators” gets, Google still asks you if you
mean “defibrillator(s)”. Oxford lists defibrillator under
defibrillation.

There’s a parallel here with vascillations like nuclear/nucular and
parap[a]legic, discussed a while back by Arnold Zwicky on Language
Log and Eric Bakovic on phonoloblog. Both refer to a piece by Geoff
Nunberg that links nucular to a morphological analogy from words like
molecular and particular. Eric extends the discussion to parap[a]
legic, suggesting a rhythmic analogy is better suited in this case. I
added two cents there in a comment about the possible role of
splitting the obstruent-liquid cluster.

Defibulator seems to fit both the morphological analogy and the
cluster splitting accounts. Morphological analogy would attribute the
appearance of defibulator to the extistence of other words that have
the sequence -bulation, -bulate, or -bulator, and the absence of
other words that have the sequence -brillation, -brillate, or -
brillator. There are words like tabulate and discombobulate, but the
only other word with -brillat- is apparently fibrillate. The cluster
splitting analysis would attribute defibulator to an avoidance of the
[br] sequence in defibrillator.

Seems to me that these analyses aren’t competing - they both presume
a lack of rigid specification on the part of the speaker as to what
the word is. So if the speaker is not quite sure what the word is,
then a constraint against [br] clusters (usually violable in English)
can have an observed effect. Emergence of the Unmarked in infrequent
words?

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