Talk:unEnglish
Add topicLatest comment: 4 years ago by Metaknowledge in topic RFD discussion: July–October 2020
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Rare misspelling of un-English. unEnglish, un-English at the Google Books Ngram Viewer. does not help here much since it chokes on hyphenated forms: when a form is split across lines, the hyphen may be part of the term or merely an indicator of word split, and GNV does not know which is the case. google books:"unEnglish" confirms as much, while it does find some true attesting quotations of unEnglish. As a further supporting testable (refutable by possible observations) thesis, English does not do camelCase except for brand names, that is, prefix cannot be attached to a capitalized word without a hyphen. That is, whenever camelCase is attested at all, it is a vanishingly rare variant of camel-Case. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:49, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
- As I said above, I have seen this in edited, published writing. I think it's somewhere in the book of Somerset Maugham short stories I'm currently reading. I'll see if I can find it. At any rate, it may be rare but I'm quite certain it is not a misspelling. —Mahāgaja · talk 12:35, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
- If we start with the premise that copyedited writing can contain misspellings, then the question is what would be the deliberative or observational basis for "I'm quite certain it is not a misspelling". --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:46, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
- Interestingly, un-English is in M-W[1], as is anti-Italian[2]. --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:49, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
- I found it and have added the quote. And this hyphenless spelling occurs not only in the edition in my possession: I found it in two other editions of the same story at b.g.c, with snippet view (at least in my country): [3] and [4]. I can believe a misprint in one edition, but not the exact same misprint in three different editions. The hyphenless spelling here is clearly deliberate. As for "un-English" and "anti-Italian" in M-W, so what? No one is denying that the spelling with the hyphen is more common. —Mahāgaja · talk 13:17, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
- Why would reprints or other editions of the same story not contain the same misspelling, if it is a misspelling? The spelling without hyphen seems vanishingly rare compared to the spelling with hyphen. Here again, what is the observation from which it follows that it is not a misspelling? Present at least once in copyedited corpus => not a misspelling? Or, intentional on part of the author => not a misspelling? --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:32, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
- Other editions would have editors and proofreaders reading the text keeping an eye out for misspellings. And these aren't just reprints, they're different editions with different page numbers and line breaks and everything, so it's not just a single misprint that got copied into other printings. And in this case at least, we have "intentional on the part of the author" + "allowed to remain by various editors and proofreaders of various publishing houses" = not a misspelling. —Mahāgaja · talk 15:58, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
- I see. But that seems still to be a rather weak evidence, I would argue, since we do not really know whether there were multiple rounds of proofreading. And even if there were multiple rounds and they really did look carefully for mistakes in what they knew was already copyedited before, it still does not amount to much more than "at least 3 independent occurrences in copyedited corpus => not a misspelling", a principle that would lead to the conclusion that concieve is not a misspelling, which seems untenable. Even if you raise 3 to 10 above, you still get a principle that is likely to declare concieve to be not a misspelling, again, untenable. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:08, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
- Other editions would have editors and proofreaders reading the text keeping an eye out for misspellings. And these aren't just reprints, they're different editions with different page numbers and line breaks and everything, so it's not just a single misprint that got copied into other printings. And in this case at least, we have "intentional on the part of the author" + "allowed to remain by various editors and proofreaders of various publishing houses" = not a misspelling. —Mahāgaja · talk 15:58, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
- Why would reprints or other editions of the same story not contain the same misspelling, if it is a misspelling? The spelling without hyphen seems vanishingly rare compared to the spelling with hyphen. Here again, what is the observation from which it follows that it is not a misspelling? Present at least once in copyedited corpus => not a misspelling? Or, intentional on part of the author => not a misspelling? --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:32, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
- I found it and have added the quote. And this hyphenless spelling occurs not only in the edition in my possession: I found it in two other editions of the same story at b.g.c, with snippet view (at least in my country): [3] and [4]. I can believe a misprint in one edition, but not the exact same misprint in three different editions. The hyphenless spelling here is clearly deliberate. As for "un-English" and "anti-Italian" in M-W, so what? No one is denying that the spelling with the hyphen is more common. —Mahāgaja · talk 13:17, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
- Keep. I can find this spelling by searching the sites of the Economist, Guardian, and Washington Post. -Mike (talk) 04:03, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
- I can find concieve here:
- The Guardian: "They concieve of Britain as a member of an eventually supranational and democratically-controlled European Community."[5]
- Washington Post: "The use of fertiltiy drugs brings about great increase in the ability of many many couples to concieve."[6]
- The Telegraph: "Peter and Kate Hill were struggling to concieve"[7].
- Would the assumption be that newspapers cannot contain misspellings? --Dan Polansky (talk) 06:33, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
- The idea that the Grauniad might contain misspellings is inconcievable. --Lambiam 20:11, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
- Sure, but how do you draw the line? I could find some other websites where unEnglish is used (probably intentionally; here for example). At what point do misspellings become merely variations? I recognize it may be a rare and nonstandard form of the word, but people on this site often use the coal mine/coalmine example for justifying including words where the space/hyphen is optional. -Mike (talk) 17:03, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
- @Mike: My point is that "I can find this spelling by searching the sites of the Economist, Guardian, and Washington Post" does not support the notion that this is not a misspelling. To determine whether something is a misspelling, I use a frequency ratio criterion, detailed in User talk:Dan Polansky/2013#What is a misspelling, which is an operationalization of WT:CFI's "There is no simple hard and fast rule, particularly in English, for determining whether a particular spelling is “correct”. Published grammars and style guides can be useful in that regard, as can statistics concerning the prevalence of various forms". That is, when a putative variant spelling is vanishingly rare compared to the main spelling, the best estimate is that it is a misspelling. I don't understand the relevance of the coalmine note above; in relation to coalmine, deleting rare misspellings removes some of the less fortunate applications of WT:COALMINE. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:38, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
- I can find concieve here:
- My feeling is the same as Mahagaja's, that it's an intentional spelling on thepart of at least some writers (that they would continue to use even if told the "usual" spelling was "un-English", unlike the situation with "concieve", where corrected editions change the spelling if they catch it, in my experience), which means it's a "
{{lb|en|nonstandard|rare}}{{altform|en|un-English}}" (given how many places I can find that call it "wrong" or advise against it), but not a misspelling, AFAICT. Comparable words include "unAmerican" and "antiSemitism"/"antiSemitic"; stackexchange nots that wordnik has some examples of "unAmerican" (on the right of that page). Julius Nicholas Hook and William Ferdinand Ekstrom's 1953 Guide to Composition, page 391, implicitly accepts that some people intentionally use(d) mid-word caps, when they write (underlining mine) that "A capital letter in the body of a word has a rather strange appearance: unAmerican. For that reason, when a prefix is attached to a capitalized word, it has become conventional to insert a hyphen: un-American, pro-British, pre-Tito." I dug around to try to find other discussions of this, but it's hard because search engines don't care about capitalization and so put "unenglish" and "unamerican" and "antisemitic" into the results. - -sche (discuss) 22:08, 19 July 2020 (UTC)- For high-frequency misspellings such as concieve, there will always be many occurrences in copyedited corpora, by definition of "high-frequency misspelling". As for "corrected editions change the spelling [concieve] if they catch it, in my experience", where can I find "corrected editions" as opposed to "editions"? What is the evidence that "corrected editions" do not correct "unEnglish"? Where did you look that I did not look, and what did you see there? --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:36, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
- Re 'where can I find "corrected editions" as opposed to "editions"?': look for works that have been published multiple times or in multiple editions; later editions often contain corrections to spelling errors in earlier editions. For example, this 1770 edition of James Steuart's Inquiry Into the Principles of Political Oeconomy contains "the idea we concieve of", while this later 1805 edition has corrected the spelling to "the idea we conceive of"; further evidence that concieve was a misspelling is that the 1770 edition also contains the correct spelling.
Native-speaker intuition or awareness as to whether people intentionally use a less-common/standard spelling is useful here. Wen Smith, Tip of My Tongue: Forays in the American Language (2000), page 217, recognizes that hyphenated forms of [prefix + Capitalized word] combinations are now standard, but chafes, saying "A dumb hyphen will stick its nose in to make work when the work is superfluous. One dumb hyphen once decided that unAmerican would be better as un-American, and a lot of people have agreed. Now, whenever a prefix is followed by a capital letter, you can expect a hyphen to turn up, as in pro-Irish or anti-Semitic." (I am addressing the general case, not only unEnglish, since this is a general phenomenon.) The unhyphenated forms could be listed as proscribed (maybe a usage note like being as's "may be considered an error"), as quite a few style guides advise to always put a hyphen, and some may even explicitly/actively advise against the unhyphenated forms. - -sche (discuss) 02:03, 21 July 2020 (UTC)- -sche: Ok, and what searches should I look at to see whether copyeditors have corrected unEnglish to un-English in at least one switch of editions? (Of course, copyeditors corrected unEnglish to un-English countless times, not necessarily between editions, or else unEnglish would not be vanishingly rare, but that's my story that has so far been rejected.) --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:38, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
- Re 'where can I find "corrected editions" as opposed to "editions"?': look for works that have been published multiple times or in multiple editions; later editions often contain corrections to spelling errors in earlier editions. For example, this 1770 edition of James Steuart's Inquiry Into the Principles of Political Oeconomy contains "the idea we concieve of", while this later 1805 edition has corrected the spelling to "the idea we conceive of"; further evidence that concieve was a misspelling is that the 1770 edition also contains the correct spelling.
- For high-frequency misspellings such as concieve, there will always be many occurrences in copyedited corpora, by definition of "high-frequency misspelling". As for "corrected editions change the spelling [concieve] if they catch it, in my experience", where can I find "corrected editions" as opposed to "editions"? What is the evidence that "corrected editions" do not correct "unEnglish"? Where did you look that I did not look, and what did you see there? --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:36, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
- Keep per above. J3133 (talk) 02:48, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
- I think it is hard to say that this is definitely a misspelling. If kept, I would prefer labelling along the lines of uncommon alt. spelling. Mihia (talk) 22:35, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
- I would change the rules for English words: a compound word where a proper noun not at the start remains capitalized is treated the same as a hyphenated form. Under that rule, unEnglish is the same as un-English but unenglish is not. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 12:24, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
- Keep. It may be seem an unEnglish spelling, but the cites do not seem to be typos or poor editing. Labelled uncommon. - Sonofcawdrey (talk) 09:23, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
- Problems with the above: 1) not all rare misspellings are specifically typos; 2) generally, rare misspellings are often found in quotes that are well copyedited except for the misspelling; this is especially so when we look at misspellings in copyedited corpora. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:42, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
- Keep as an uncommon or rare, sometimes proscribed, alternative form (but not a misspelling per se), based on my longer comments above. - -sche (discuss) 19:04, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
- RFD-kept. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 05:35, 4 October 2020 (UTC)