[Corpora-List] pronunciation

[Gregor Erbach]

At 10.38 am 24-7-02 +0800, Josephine Lo wrote:
>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 did a search on Google, and got the following counts:

pronunciation: 953,000 (only English: 472,000)
pronounciation: 36,000 (only English: 32,700)
both pronunciation and pronounciation: 5,320

pronounce (only English): 205,000
pronunce (only English): 905

To see the changes over time, I checked the Google newsgroup
archive (formerly DejaNews) for English-language messages.

Google Groups 1983:
-------------------
pronunciation: 72
pronounciation: 40

Google Groups 1988:
-------------------
pronunciation: 90
pronounciation: 33

Google Groups 2002:
-------------------
pronunciation: 28,800
pronounciation: 4,430

It appears that the frequency of the error has not increased
over time. I would expect the error to occur quite frequently,
since "pronunciation" is not a regular morphological derivation
from "pronounce", but must be learned as an exception.

The following is an easily readable introduction to language
change:

Language change: Progress or decay? 3rd edition (1st edition1981).
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

regards,

   Gregor Erbach


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dr. Gregor Erbach                  http://purl.org/net/gregor/
Saarland University                http://www.uni-sb.de/
Computational Linguistics Dept.    http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/
Project COLLATE                    http://collate.dfki.de/
Tel. +49 (681) 302-5354            mailto:gor at acm.org