Eggcorn Forum

Discussions about eggcorns and related topics

You are not logged in.

Announcement

Registrations are currently closed because of a technical problem. Please send email to if you wish to register.

The forum administrator reserves the right to request users to plausibly demonstrate that they are real people with an interest in the topic of eggcorns. Otherwise they may be removed with no further justification. Likewise, accounts that have not been used for posting may be removed.

Thanks for your understanding.

Chris -- 2018-04-11

#1 2008-11-28 03:45:57

nilep
Eggcornista
Registered: 2007-03-21
Posts: 291

asteriks << asterisk; aks << ask

I’ve moved this over from the asteroid << asterisk thread, since it’s not an eggcorn, but does interest me.

JonW719 wrote:

Actually, most people I know, regardless of background, seem to say “asterix.” I think the isks sound is just a difficult or awkward one to pronounce.

DavidTuggy responded:

Well, are they mispronouncing asterisks or asterisk or both? Is isk as hard to pronounce, in your estimation? Does anybody say riks_for _risk or risks ? Or is it only unstressed or poststress syllables that are subject to this change? Basilix, anyone? (What other di- or tri-syllabic words end in isk?)

to which patschwieterman added:

I’ve definitely heard people say “asterix” numerous times.
...
In Old English, “acsian,” “ahsian,” and “ascian” are all common variants of the verb that becomes “ask” in Modern English, so /sk/></ks/ metathesis goes back a good long ways.

and David allowed:

Yeah, I’m not doubting that the metathesis happens, and as you show, it can go both ways. I was questioning Jon’s theory that it happens because isk(s) is hard to pronounce. ¶ I mean, I ax of you, why aren’t you busy about your many taxs?

As Jon observes, and as David’s joke suggests, this s-k metathesis is common in some English words, but by no means all such words.

IANAP*, but I wonder why. I have a vague recollection that there is a historical argument out there in the linguistic universe, though I can’t recall any specifics. By ‘historical argument,’ I mean that there is a suggestion that aks in some dialects derives from Old English acsian (or something similar), while other dialects come from ascian. Of course, this essentially just pushes the ‘why’ question back a few centuries, rather than attempting to answer it.

Donca Steriade (2001) says that changes such as asterisk >> asteriks are common, while the opposite (e.g. chips >> chisp) basically never happens. She suggests that this owes not to ease of articulation, but to an ease of perception. That is, she suggests that it is easier to hear the stop consonant (the K-sound) when it is next to the vowel.

It’s an interesting suggestion, but it doesn’t suggest why asteriks and aks should be widely attested, while risk >> riks or task >> taks are not.

Anyone care to hazard a theory? or suggest other theories you know of?

asterix: I Am Not A Phonologist

Offline

 

#2 2008-11-28 06:31:04

Peter Forster
Eggcornista
From: UK
Registered: 2006-09-06
Posts: 1222

Re: asteriks << asterisk; aks << ask

Until David expressed some doubt I’d assumed it was self-evident that ‘ax’ was easier to articulate than ‘ask’ and I’m having a bit of a struggle in assuming a neutral stance. In working with children with speech difficulties I’ve come across riks/risk, taks/task and even ‘macs’ for mask, but never ‘wask’ for wax. I think it would be true to say that ax for ask has been more common in more isolated and less literate groups, though the picture over here is becoming confused by the Ebonical influence. Certainly illiterates and those with a ‘deep’ dialect unsullied by too much access to outside influences were more likely to employ ‘ax’ and I think there must be some mileage in the notion that this variant has been used continuously outside ‘polite’ or ‘correct’ speech.
‘Taxes’ with its extra syllable does seem much easier to mouth than ‘tasks’ and I’m reminded of an illiterate friend who used ‘ax’ but pronounced ‘rusks’, for example, as ‘russucks’. He also referred to ‘crusts’ and ‘joists’ as crusses and joyces as did many in that speech community, and such terms still seem to trip from the lip with far greater ease than the standard forms.

Last edited by Peter Forster (2008-11-28 08:47:06)

Offline

 

#3 2008-11-28 11:45:53

DavidTuggy
Eggcornista
From: Mexico
Registered: 2007-10-11
Posts: 2713
Website

Re: asteriks << asterisk; aks << ask

What’s easy or hard is a very complicated question. Languages that go in for certain kinds of things train their speakers till certain kinds of hard things are relatively easy. I can say lengths or amidst without much effort, and distinguishing between kook and cook is a breeze, but these are nearly impossible for one who’s grown up only speaking Spanish or Nahuatl. On the other hand it is not easy for English speakers to begin a word with ng or ks or ts, or to begin or end one with tl, but those things are not a problem to speakers of some other languages. Even mixing clicks into your speech and distinguishing one click from another isn’t hard if you grew up speaking Xhosa.
.
This doesn’t deny that there are some pretty clearly identifiable universal “slopings” of difficulty. Single consonants are generally easier than consonant clusters, and (tautosyllabic) consonant clusters where the more vowel-like consonants (voiced, continuant, etc.) are next to the central vowel (nucleus of the syllable) and the less-vowel-like ones are further from the vowel are easier. Voiceless stops ( p, t, k ) are the least vowel-like sounds. Sibilants seem to be funny, though, in that sometimes they appear closer to the nucleus and sometimes farther. Glottals (glottal stop and h ) are also weird in the ways they wind up being distributed. Nasals like being before a homorganic stop better than after, even when in different syllables: antie is apparently always easier than atnie .
.
Anyhow, English speakers clearly learn to pronounce V-Sib-Stop (e.g. rasp ) and V-Stop-Sib (e.g. raps ), and V-Sib-Stop-Sib (e.g. rasps ) as well. (We don’t do V-Stop-Sib-Stop, e.g. we never say rapsp and it’s pretty hard for us to do even if we try.) It is less than clear to me that V-Sib-Stop is easier or harder for us than V-Stop-Sib, and it seems that historically the switches between them do not go in only one direction.
.
Whether changes in one direction are privileged (and in what degree) because “easier” in some more universal, non-English-bound sense, sounds like the sort of question that I would expect several dissertations to have been written about without really resolving the issue.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-11-28 11:53:23)


*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

(Possible Corollary: it is, and we are .)

Offline

 

#4 2008-11-28 13:53:28

patschwieterman
Administrator
From: California
Registered: 2005-10-25
Posts: 1680

Re: asteriks << asterisk; aks << ask

Nilep wrote:

Donca Steriade (2001) says that changes such as asterisk >> asteriks are common, while the opposite (e.g. chips >> chisp) basically never happens. She suggests that this owes not to ease of articulation, but to an ease of perception. That is, she suggests that it is easier to hear the stop consonant (the K-sound) when it is next to the vowel.

Steriade is presumably talking about Modern English, and she may be right that the change to a stop-initial cluster (/ps/,/ks/, etc.) is privileged in ModE—I don’t know enough to have an opinion. But I’m having no trouble coming up with historical counterexamples off the top of my head. Old English “tux” is interesting—it became “tusk” in Modern English. (The OED seems to think that its original form in OE was “tusc,” but the OEDers admit that that’s quite rare, and the actual origin of the word is obscure—only Frisian shares this one with us). Our ModE word “hasp” for a fastening was originally “haepse” in OE, and some Modern English dialects still use “hapse”—I just googled up some examples. And then there are all the cases where OE developed a stop-initial variant but the s-initial form still won out in Middle English and later: “wlips” was a possible variant of “wlisp” (“lisping”); “fixas” for “fiscas” (“fishes”) is quite common in OE orthography. And I’m sure there are plenty of others. These don’t go in the direction that Steriade suggests they might. Maybe what was easy to perceive for a 13th C speaker of Middle English was different from what’s easily perceived by a 21st C speaker. That would surprise me, however; both Old English and Middle English had plenty of words with consonant clusters of both types.

I think the situation is probably more complicated (and yes, I realize that Nilep was just giving a 3-sentence summary; I don’t want to seem to be beating up on Steriade just because all I know of her work is someone else’s brief paraphrase). I bet that if you drew up a long list of “native” words (i.e., words with an origin in Old English) that had a postvocalic s-initial cluster, you’d find that the OED would list stop-initial spelling variants in Modern English for many of them. That’s the case for lisp and hasp, and they’re the only ones I’ve tried. I suspect that this is like eggcorns: one direction of reshaping may be privileged, but if you look hard enough and have enough data, you’ll find reshaping wherever reshaping is possible and not strongly discouraged by some other circumstance.

Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-11-28 14:05:09)

Offline

 

Board footer

Powered by PunBB
PunBB is © 2002–2005 Rickard Andersson
Individual posters retain the copyright to their posts.

RSS feeds: active topicsall new posts