[Corpora-List] pronunciation

[Crowdy, Steve]

This word has many mispelling variants. The Longman Learners Corpus (around
11 million words) lists the following spellings of "pronunciation":

pronunciation (frequency 154)
pronounciation (49)
prononciation (6)
pronunication (6)
pronuciation (4)

Other misspellings in the LLC include: pronuntiation, pronanciation,
pronuntation, pronuncition, pronunciotion, pronuncation, pronouncition,
pronounceretion, pronouncation, pronouciation, and pronoucation.

Even in native speaker corpora "pronouciation" does creep in. Looking at a
large corpus of UK news data, even the hallowed pages of the BBC website
reveals 10 instances of "pronounciation".

Steve Crowdy
Longman Dictionaries


-----Original Message-----
From: Peter K Tan [mailto:petertan at leonis.nus.edu.sg]
Sent: 24 July 2002 04:42
To: CORPORA at HD.UIB.NO
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] pronunciation


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


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