From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Fri Dec 10 2004 - 19:38:12 CST
At 12:50 PM 12/10/2004, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>Tim Greenwood asked:
>
> > > ... a perfectly normal linguistic process of
> > > attributive disambiguation of a term which had grown ambiguous
> > > in usage.
> >
> > Is that like the 'Please RSVP' that I see all too often? Or should
> > that not be excused?
>
>*grins* Well, technically, that is not a case of attributive
>disambiguation, but rather ignorant redundancy.
>
>On the other hand, for many English speakers, "RSVP" is simply
>learned as an unanalyzed verb, pronounced "aressveepee", meaning
>"send a response to this message". And to castigate such speakers
>for politely prepending a "please" to that verb is a little
>too much, don't you think?
Other examples of apparent redundancy, are
Cakes -> Keks (German), plural Kekse
Baby -> bebis (Swedish), plural bebissar
and there are many more such examples.
A./
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Dec 10 2004 - 19:41:55 CST