Re: "Preservative" assimilation?

Eric Christopherson wrote:
> First off, please excuse the long post.
>
> On May 15, 2008, at 2:31 AM, R A Brown wrote:
>
>> Eric Christopherson wrote:
>>> Is there such a thing as "preservative assimilation"? I noticed today
>>> that a lot of articles on Wikipedia claim so, but IIRC the term is
>>> "perseverative". I don't know for sure, though, so I'm not fixing it
>>> yet.
[snip]
>
> What you're missing (I think) is my original thesis - that the word
> "preservative" is either a) a typo or b) a word which someone selected,
> when they really *meant* another, similar word. (What would you call
> that, anyway? It's kind of like the eggcorn phenomenon, but not quite.)
Sorry - you're right. I must read more carefully    :=(

I think 'malapropism' is what you're thinking of. but it could be a
type. I noticed that in the snipped bit I also made a type: I wrote
'perservative assimilation' when I meant 'perseverative assimilation'.

I would guess that something similar happened when 'preservative
assimilation' entered the literature. It is surely far more likely that
'perseverative assimilation' got mis-written or mis-remembered as
'preservative assimilation' since 'preservative' is not an uncommon word
in normal parlance, but 'perseverative' is. Indeed, my spell checker
didn't know the latter adjective - I had to 'teach' it!

> I believe the semantics of the term are that features of the first
> (leftmost) sound *persevere*;
Yep - that fits.

> the idea of *preservation* doesn't seem
> that relevant to me, although I suppose you could make a case that lag
> assimilation "preserves" features of the first sound, whereas in the
> more common (AFAIK) regressive assimilation, the first sound loses some
> of its features. But I think that's a bit of a stretch.
I agree entirely. While the notion of the perseveration of some
feature(s) of the first sound is not unreasonable, the preservation idea
is a bit of a stretch. This again is IMO another indication that the
original term was 'perseverative' or 'perseveratory'.

> I was hoping someone would check some linguistics literature for me, so
> I could make sure. I did check Google Books, and only found three hits
> for the phrase "preservative assimilation".
[snip]

> By contrast, "perseverative assimilation" gets 60 hits, so I think that
> is likely the correct term.
I think so. Yes, all the indications are surely that "perseverative
assimilation" (or "perseveratory assimilation") was the original form.


--
Ray
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