Suboptimist

Sacrilicious.

My most recent assignment for historical linguistics was on analogical change. Part of the assignment required me to note examples of analogical change around me. Some of the examples I cited included things friends and I say. Well, mostly friends who are node-members say these:

· Succumb/succumbed/succumbed becoming succumb/succame/succame on analogy with with come/came/came.

· Ding/dinged/dinged to ding/dang/dang (or dung) on analogy to ring/rang/rung.

· Sacrilicious as a blend of sacrilegious and delicious. This is used to denote something that is remarkable, but perhaps also a sacrilege. I don’t know who came up with this originally, but it’s wonderful.

· Mayhaps as a blend of maybe and perhaps.

· To recreate, backforming from recreation.

Other analogical changes used commonly:

· Gruntled backforming from disgruntled.

· Thusly as a hyperrcorrection.

· Lead/leaded/leaded leveled from lead/lead/lead. This is highly used, but also highly stigmatized.

Any other examples from English or other languages?

While were at it, Dr. Campbell spoke with us today about the difference between a dialect and a language. Dialect is notoriously ill-defined. There are a couple of definitions used: dialects are mutually intelligible; a language is a dialect with an army. These seem to apply in some cases. The latter applies to Norwegian and Swedish are mutually intelligible, for example, but they both have their own armies (and independence for that matter). A similar situation is Dari and Farsi, which are mutually intelligible, but Farsi is the official language of Iran, while Dari is spoken in pockets within Iran.

The picture becomes really clouded when speaking about Arabic. Moroccan Arabic and Levantine Arabic are not mutually intelligible. Morocco and [Syria, Lebanon, Jordan] have their own nations and militaries, yet both are called dialects of Arabic. Further complicating the picture is what my structure of Arabic professor said to me: dialects share underlying representations (at least phonologically), but I wonder how many underlying representations are shared between Moroccan and Levantine.