Search the Web for `Missippi' and you'd find thousands of hits showing pages where the authors clearly meant Mississippi. With the advent of modern computers and spell-checkers you'd think this illustration of haplography will not occur so often. If you feel this is bad, imagine the time before the printing press came along, when the only way to make copies of a book was with a quill and parchment. Sorry, no photocopying machines to crank out double-sided copies there. Biblical translations and copies of other books from olden times are replete with haplography and its cousins. Many scholars spend their lifetime identifying these `bugs' in ancient books and other scripts.
A counterpart of haplography is haplology (AWAD, May 15, 2000). Haplology occurs when one `eats' a few letters while pronouncing a word. Latin nutrix (nurse) came from earlier nutritrix. Chancery, a contraction of chancellery, is now an acceptable part of the English language. Do you think some day `probly' will be considered standard and `probably' obsolete? If there are some who economize on letters, there are others who splurge. The word for this phenomenon is called dittography. This week we'll see a few more words about words.
Not exactly the same thing, but related are the sometimes comical errors that now creep into print because spellcheckers pass words not exactly the ones the author intended. For instance I saw an article in which the word "forward" was used when the sentence clearly called for "foreword".
"The loss of one of two identical or similar adjacent syllables in a word, as in Latin nûtrîx, “nurse,” from earlier ·nûtrîtrîx."
given this, i think the preferred pronunciation of 'haplology' would be "haplogy".
a related phenomenon would be epenthesis, which is the insertion of a sound in the middle of a word; i witness it quite often in my children's speech, as they are striving for pronunciation of difficult sound combinations.
Not exactly the same thing, but related are the sometimes comical errors that now creep into print because spellcheckers pass words not exactly the ones the author intended. For instance I saw an article in which the word "forward" was used when the sentence clearly called for "foreword".
It's another of those words that go out of their way not to apply to themselves. If today's word were to practice what it preaches we would be seeing a leaner, meaner version of it, one that would be more suitable for Scrabble, and save two keystrokes. How does haplogy sound? See you in a few hundred years! In the meanwhile, look for more meta-words or words about words in AWAD during this week. =========================================================
i was tempted to mourn the fact that the one time i thought of something clever, it'd already been posted, but then it dawned on me that it was *anu* whose thinking i was mirroring.....
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