[Corpora-List] pronunciation

[Peter K Tan]

At 10.38 am 24-7-02 +0800, Josephine Lo wrote:
>Dear all,
>I'm interested in the word "pronunciation" since recently I noticed
>that it is quite commonly misspelled as "pronounciation". Is this a
>common mistake only among non-native speakers?

I don't have access to Learner Corpora, but it might be worthwhile doing a
search there. Speaking based on my experience of marking essays from
Singaporean students, the spelling 'pronounciation' appears to be the
majority spelling - and they still surprisingly predominate in these days
of spell-check. (They also pronounce it with the /aU/ diphthong.) Also, I
find 'maintainance' as well, whereas others like 'renunciation',
'denunciation' don't occur frequently enough for me to notice a tendency.
'Annunciation' is more specialised and is typically spelt as such -
presumably because of its occurrence in Christian contexts.

>Is is possible that the "o" one would make its way through and
>eventually replace "pronunciation"?

Spelling in English is very conservative. I would imagine that it would
need more than the spellings of second-language to influence change and it
is the spelling of Inner Circle speakers that would be crucial. More
crucially, they would need to change the pronunciation of 'pronunciation' -
compare this with the spellings 'shew' and 'show' which co-existed for a
long time before the former waned not too long ago.

Cheers,
Peter