Re: Pronunciate. *ZAP*

Josh Brandt-Young <neonwave7@...> wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Mar 1999 10:11:32 -0500 Brian Betty <bbetty@...> writes:
>
> >If I were the Lord, I would permit people to speak as they wish -
> >except
> >for the use of ironical and pronunciate. That'd get you a painful
> >lightening [note: try "lightning"] bolt every time. Zap!
[snip]

> And why does "pronunciate" bother you so much? I've personally never
> heard it (though I have observed "conversate"), and though it's obviously
> "incorrect," I don't see what the big deal is. Language is changing all
> the time; who knows, maybe some day these will be in common use in
> certain dialects--such shifts are nothing unusual.
I recently read a little book by the recently-late
Adolfo Bioy Casares -- I don't know if you know him,
but he was just second to Borges -- which was dedicated
to words like "pronunciate" or "conversate" (in Spanish,
of course) and some other over-elaborated terms which
appear again and again in political speeches and TV news.
The book is called "Diccionario del argentino exquisito"
and it has sort of a prescriptivist tone first -- until
the writer explains that most new words are first thought
to be incorrect or pompous.

Nevertheless he goes on pointing some awful words
(usually overderived), like "obsoletizar" (obsolet- + -izar,
"to make obsolete"), or "completacio'n". In the last case,
the "correct" form is "complecio'n" (completion). It appears
that the actual root of the word involves complet- (which
would give complet- + -ion > complecio'n, but after the many
words in -cio'n, people have taken completo-, completa- and
added that. I'm sure you've heard such things in your own
natlangs. What's it called, reanalysis?


--Pablo Flores

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