burger, 'burger, -burger

[bwald]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
In my last message I wrote at a certain point:
 
>...  All of this, of course, depends somewhat on whether "burger" as an
>independent word came >into existence BEFORE OR AFTER "hamburger"
 
That was a  mistake.  I meant "cheeseburger", not "hamburger", as in the
parenthetical expansion that followed the above:
 
>(something we may never know, though it might seem almost within our reach
>to know, ESP, and NOTE THIS, if the origins of the two were ORAL, and
>their order of written appearance is relatively close -- as is probable --
>and arbitrary. In fact, except for "dialect representation", we might
>expect "burger", like "gator", to be suppressed in written language until
>it had spread quite widely, leaving doubt about its true chronological
>relationship to the emergence of "cheeseburger" and the rest of the
>(-)burger family. EG one abridged 1994 dictionary gives "cheeseburger"
>from 1938 but does not acknowledge "burger" EXCEPT as a combined =
>dependent form, ignoring that "burger" has been short for "hamburger" to
>my ears for I-don't-know-how-long, many decades at least.  Surprisingly,
>this dictionary, despite its >intentional incompleteness, does list
>"gator" from 1844, no initial apostrophe or hyphen.)
 
"hamburger" itself is dated back to 1884 by the dictionary, early enough to
assume it is actually quite a bit older than "cheeseburger", even in speech
(but the latter depends crucially on the emergence of the practice it
describes; was there ever a commonly used expression "cheese hamburger"?).
Thus, if "cheeseburger" is really older than "burger" for "hamburger",
"hamburger" went unclipped for quite a long time (since no other clipping
is reported).  "frank" (1904) for "frankfurter" (1894) shows a different
clipping technique (not to mention "hot dog" (1900), cf. the recent "corn
dog"), but its relatively rapid condensation still leads to questions about
either how people resisted condensation for so long with "hamburger" (if
that is the case) or when the thing became at least as popular as the frank
(or should I say the "hot dog"?) so that there was motivation for
condensation.  There is a lot of detail in historical linguistics, isn't
there?