[Lexicog] Re: orientate

[Rudolph C Troike]

My belated apologies to John Roberts and all followers of British
standards. I suppose the American usage represents one of those
archaic survivals (like "fall" for autumn). I was just reading this
week a statement by Charles Ferguson from the 1960s about the
ignorance of American linguists about British usage, and admit to
be following in the same tradition.

As Mike Maxwell and Ken Hill noted, "orient", borrowed from French
"orienter", is the older form in British usage (and closer to the
source form). Clearly the back-formation "orientate" was not long
in appearing and became standard. However, evidently a funny thing
happened along the way. American dominance in technology, with its
accompanying linguistic hegemony, among other things led to the
replacement of the British "wireless" by "radio", and "orient", as
part of tech-speak, has evidently had a similar effect, at least
within the technological speech community.

I did a quick check on Google the other day for domains excluding
.uk and for .uk only, with the following results, which may surprise
both John Roberts and Mike Maxwell:

		-.uk			.uk only

orient		 5,690,000		  638,000
oriented	64,100,000		1,010,000

orientate	   139,000		   24,500
orientated	 1,810,000		  518,000


So apparently "orientate(d)" is becoming a minority usage even in
Britain, at least within the websites of Googleworld.


     Rudy Troike
     University of Arizona
     Tucson, Arizona, USA



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