Eggcorn Forum

Wow. This one’s really weird. I googled “unyet,” and you’re right: there are a lot of people out there writing “unyet” to mean “and yet.” I thought that was a bit strange, but it’s actually not as bizarre as a second use of “unyet” that’s out there. There’s a somewhat unwieldy construction in English that follows the pattern “as yet un-” – as in “as yet unidentified,” “as yet uncharacterized,” etc. People seem to have simplified it by switching the places of the “yet” and the “un-.” And it’s not chiefly 13 year olds on myspace or people writing a really quick note in a sports forum who are doing this; there are a number of scientists who seem to be passing this around one to another. For instance, the first example is from the website of the Smithsonian National Zoo. It’s not an eggcorn; it’s a species unyet identified. Examples:

Second, within the high levels ‘unplanned’ biodiversity of traditional cacao farms, it is likely we will find many species that perform as unyet studied or quantified “ecological services” such as biological control of pests and disease.
http://nationalzoo.si.edu/ConservationA … enberg.cfm

This is the ‘Building Materials in Archaeology’ home page, which aims to explore the possibilities as unyet discovered within the field to date.
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~ian.windsor/bs.htm

In some of the samples there were also significant numbers of as an unyet identified Alexandrium species.
http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~frf/ha01usup.html

These finding suggest that in contrast to what has been found previously for Rhodobacter species, PpsR acts in R. gelatinosus as an aerobe repressor of crtI gene, meanwhile it acts as an aerobe activator for the expression of both pucBA and an unyet identified bch gene.
http://www.publish.csiro.au/nid/197/paper/SA0403131.htm

By an unyet characterized event cells differentiate into preadipocytes.
http://classes.aces.uiuc.edu/AnSci312/A … iplect.htm

The Liturgy says the following about the unyet consecrated gifts, not the Body & Blood, “and presenting unto Thee the holy emblems [one sees different translations of this word like ‘symbol’] of the sacred Body & Blood of Thy Christ, we pray Thee and implore Thee, O Holy of Holies, by the favour of Thy goodness, that Thy Holy Spirit may descend upon us, and upon these gifts here spread forth before Thee, and bless them, and sanctify and manifest them.”
http://monachos.net/forum/showthread.php?p=35600

Well, I am a writer, who is unyet published.
http://www.komikwerks.com/forum/archive … t-298.html

Yet contrasted against the rhetoric we’ve been hearing in Washington state concerning the still unyet resolved gubernatorial race, one can only marvel at the irony.
http://www.kirkdorffer.com/ontheroadto2 … tons.shtml

Sonic reaches unyet spoken, but somehow intimated by masterful design, stretching as far as the static can allow.
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/13/084234.php

Yeah, don’t forget the MPAA violated copyright law itself, by making illegal copies of “This film is unyet rated”.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060623/0149218.shtml

Many of the Meditation Games I’ve been designing lately have been for groups of meditators, or meditating groups, or both. These games involve an unyet-documented and significantly amusing leap in the art of Frog of Enlightenupmenting: Cross-Frogging.
http://www.deepfun.com/weblog/2002_07_01_blogger.html

Thanks for posting “unyet”—I think this is one of the more interesting head-scratchers that’s come down the pipe recently.

And you’re certainly right that some kind of switcheroo is happening here. I’m just not sure why. One more guess. I think maybe two fairly equivalent constructions may be competing here. People can have recourse to either ”(as) yet unidentified” or to “not yet identified.” Since “not” and “un-” are sometimes almost interchangeable (“that’s not likely” vs. “that’s unlikely”), there may be an unconscious tendency to substitute one for the other—no matter where.

But somehow that just isn’t the whole story. “Unyet” has a weird “rightness” to it that I don’t quite understand. Now that I’ve been desensitized to it, “unyet” almost doesn’t sound wrong anymore—and I’m not sure why.

I think that technically neither use of “unyet” is an eggcorn. We usually assume that an eggcorn will involve a word that’s entirely different from the original word. And both senses of “unyet” are still based on “yet.” In the “and yet” usage, “unyet” is more or less a phonetic spelling, with the “un-” apparently representing the reduction of the vowel in “and.”

Pat

O wow! What a lovely, no-longer-unyet-opened can of worms!

No time to think it through at the moment, and the pertumations are endless, but:

Words like yet, already and still behave wierdly when negated, and what one language does is not necessarily what another does. I share the suspicion that non-native speakers may be involved here. The prevalence of scientific papers adds to this suspicion: there are an awful lot of speakers of other Englishes, which are informed and affected in subtle ways by other languages, who are publishing in science.

In Spanish, if you say “todavía no” = literally “still not” you mean what we usually say in English as “not yet”. ( = unyet in ) I wonder if “still unyet”, used above, fits in. In the Nawatl of the town neighboring us, they say mach-ok = “not-still” to mean “no longer, not any more”. (Remember that “yet” has usages where it is (near- )synonymous with “still”: They’re at it yet = They’re still at it; things that are still undone = things that are yet undone.) The Nawatl for “not yet” is mach-yi = “not already”. The Spanish “ya no”, literally “already not” means “no longer, not any more”. The semantics of all this is extremely complex. It goes part way to say that there is a difference of “scope” of the negators vs. the “adverb of (non-)persistence”, but there’s more to it than that.

If this makes your head spin, you are not alone.

Anyhow, bottom line for us: These “unyet” usages have a real logic to them, which (I think) lies behind their “insidious capacity to start seeming non-odd the longer you think (or don’t think) about it.” People whose languages already follow such an odd (from our perspective) logic may be more susceptible to using English to express that logic, but even native speakers might chance upon it and start using it.

But I don’t see the eggcorning. I agree that if we were to find usages where “unyet” substituted for “and yet”, we’d be closer to it, unyet even that wouldn’t be enough. Suppose the previous sentence were written inadvertently (instead of uninadvertently, as was the case). What restructuring would the “un-” be providing? ‘less (Unless) it was the practically redundant “un-” we’ve noted in another recent post or two?

And of course blending and other mechanisms can be at work here. Take this quote:

Yet contrasted against the rhetoric we’ve been hearing in Washington state concerning the still unyet resolved gubernatorial race, one can only marvel at the irony.

I can see this easily as a blend-cum-metathesis (not a terribly unusual combination) of “still unresolved” and “yet unresolved”.

Anyway …

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-08-26 07:55:26)