Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
It’s been mentioned a couple of places (here and here , for instance) that the English endings – nts and – nce sound pretty much if not exactly alike. (They are entirely alike in my speech, as far as I can tell.) I have documented the following malaprops, and they can be pretty easily confirmed on the Internet:
. – nts where you expect – nce :
audients < audience, silents < silence, differents < difference, correspondents < correspondence, assistants < assistance, ignorants < ignorance
. – nce where you expect – nts :
componence < components, instance < instants, inhabitance < inhabitants, antidepressance / ants (?), ingredience < ingredients, variance < variants,
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and other relevant forms like impatience < impatient and others.
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Some of this is doubtless more a spelling issue than anything else, but there is a significant overlap of cases in which a pluralized noun ending in – nt makes sense with cases in which an “abstract noun of process or fact [or however you define – ance/-ence ]” also makes sense. Just for instance, an audience is generally composed of audients (listeners), and the inhabitance of a country is accomplished by and coextensive with, if not quite identical to, its inhabitants. It feels right to me to say that even at the level of the suffixes we have a complex eggcorn, and that this eggcorn, which goes in both directions, produces other eggcorns which go in one or the other of those directions.
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The cases are not all equal, of course. Ignorance is not exactly composed of or coextensive with ignorants in the same way as audience < audients or componence <> components.
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Anyhow, there are bound to be other cases out there worthy of consideration as part of these lists.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2023-05-05 11:08:07)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Entrants/entrance springs to mind and, given the propensity hereabouts for gaily sprinkling stresses wherever whim decides, there is a third decidedly eggcornish possibility that someone unfamiliar with en-trance in the sense of enchantment could read entranced as being somehow restrained by a doorway, or gated. But how to find examples?
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