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Pastimes : My House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (5526)	2/28/2003 9:27:16 AM
From: MulhollandDrive	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

thank you..very intresting <gg> now we know the nukulus of nukular. (too bad you didn't post this on wenzday) :) So let's examine this particular change (for that is what it is, not just some random 'error'). We are interested in trying to give some sort of explanation for why this pronunciation might have arisen in the first place, since, as you point out, it is quite common. [Never mind what your grammar school teacher told you about 'quite' -- it now means 'very', at least in America.] Obviously, the word 'nuclear' is composed of at least two parts: 'nucle-' and '-ar'. The second is a predictable variant of '-al' after a Romance stem which contains an 'l', often at the end of the stem: scale - scalar. Note that the stem may be an independent word, as in the last example. Now, when we add -al/ar to a word or stem, certain changes regularly take place. If the stem ends in a consonant plus 'l', a vowel is inserted before the 'l': carbuncle /karbunkl/ - carbuncular, circle /sirkl/ - circular, etc. What appears to have happened here is that instead of a rather strange stem /nukli/, where the insertion of the 'u' would not take place since the 'l' is not at the end of the stem, the stem has been reformed by a process similar to 'folk etymology', and we end up with the stem /nukl/, which will quite naturally give us 'nucular', just like 'circular'. In general in English, when a word has an unusual structure in one way or another, and especially if it is fairly common, it tends to get restructured so as to make it more like other common words in the language. Some aspects of this process are what we call 'folk etymology'. It seems to me that this is what we are dealing with in this case. Of course, knowing or guessing the origin of a 'new' pronunciation or grammatical feature won't necessarily make you accept it, but at least we can perhaps be a little more understanding of those who lack the classical background to realize that they are committing such a heinous error (we might even be understanding to those who don't care). Jim James L. Fidelholtz, Ph. D. e-mail: jfidel@siu.cen.buap.mx A'rea de Ciencias del Lenguaje Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades Beneme'rita Universidad Auto'noma de Puebla, Me'xico