[Corpora-List] Lesser (sic) used languages

[Raphael Salkie]

Google found 39,500,000 instances of "less used" and about 3,940,000 of
"lesser used"; many  of the latter were instances of  "Lesser Used
Languages"!

The BNC has 12 occurrences of "less used" and two of  "lesser used".  The
two instances of  "lesser used" both form part of an attributive adjective
phrase:

lesser used depots
the smaller lesser used remedies

None of the 12 examples of "less used" is attributive.  Typical are:

one which was less used
pesticides are less used than they were
Why do you think that direct file organization is less used than some other
file organization techniques?

(The search also found several instances of "less used" with a voiceless s,
meaning "accustomed", as in:  "Is it that men are simply less used to
looking after themselves").

Other (rare) instances of "lesser" with a passive participle in the BNC are
also attributive, e.g.

the lesser studied Andean view of history
lesser developed countries
the lesser known eastern valleys

Because "lesser" is mostly employed as an adjective (lesser mortals, etc),
whereas "less" is often an adverb, when it comes to choosing which word to
pick to modify an adjective in an adjective phrase, maybe speakers tend to
choose the one which is more adjective-like.

Raphael Salkie
University of Brighton

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On
Behalf Of Somers, Harold
Sent: 10 February 2005 00:42
To: mt-list at eamt.org; CORPORA at UIB.NO
Subject: [Corpora-List] Lesser (sic) used languages

Sorry for cross-posting, but I just saw an announcement for a conference on
"Lesser Used Languages & Computer Linguistics", which looks like an
interesting conference, but (the point of this posting), does anyone else
cringe when they see "lesser used"? Shouldn't it be "less used"?