Discussion Forum (Archived)
Guest
I've been hearing it for some time, but chalked it up to quick speech: infinitesimal pronounced as INFANTesimal . OK, so maybe the crowd I hang out with uses the word infinitesimal more than they should. Still, I hear it a lot.
I heard it mispronounced this morning on a podcast from the mouth of a scientist speaking slowly and carefully -- IN-FAN-TES-I-MAL.
I can't remember the last time I heard it pronounced fully. A web search -- even Google books -- shows up some seemingly unintended misspellings as infantesimal.
End of rant.
Yeah, I've been hearing that more often too. Don't like it, but totally understand it. Ngrams was a bust, so this usage must be newer than 2000. Sounds to me like one of those many instances where people who hear the word just assume the spelling (and pronunciation). I mean, it kinda makes sense ... if infinitesimal means "something very small" then the substitution of "infant" for "infinite" seems like a natural error. Not unlike how, as a child, I thought the "Taj Mahal" was the "Tashma Hall" ... until I saw it in print and realized the error of my ways.
I think it's more than just "quick speech," as Glenn suggests. I think it's more a matter of learning the language by hearing rather than reading.
Ngrams aren't likely to show it because most people have spell-check.
I'm less annoyed by the "infantesimal" pronunciation (although I hear more "infantessmal") than I am by newscritters talking about sexual "harris mint" because the latter is mostly deliberate, by those who should know better.
My brother's GPS talks of "toely-dough", that city in NW Ohio. Native American names confuse people, too. I have heard ignorant newscasters talk of "wuh bptch he" (Ouacaxhe State Park is pronounced "Wabash"), "wuh WASS sea" (Lake Wawasee is pronounced "Wah Wah Sea") and "POKE a gone" (Pokagon State Park is pronounced "Poe KAY gun").
Forty years ago, the morning newspaper in Fort Wayne did a front page story about the availani;ity of livestock feed, in which they spelled it "Alphalpha" instead of "alfalfa". Google finds 44,100,000 pages with "Adolph Hitler" versus only 2,340,000 for the correct spelling of "Adolf Hitler"
deaconB said: Ngrams aren’t likely to show it because most people have spell-check.
Spell-check first arrived for personal computers in 1980, according to Wiki. Until Ngrams scans their corpus beyond 2000, we won't likely see that kind of filtering. But you make a good point about Ngrams ... this result only goes to 2008 (the default was 2000). I entered 2014 and it reset to 2008. Obviously a work in progress.
A Google search of "infantesimal" yields a mere 4,370 hits, whereas "infinitesimal" yields 4,290,000. This new spelling is an aberration at best. I doubt it will ever become part of the language.
Actually, my intended point was that ngrams don't reflect pronunciations, only the written language.
For instance, ngrams would tell us something of Jehu in the bible being replaced by the Swiftian Yahoo, but they don't tell us anything about the swing from the yay hoo pronunciation of Swift's day to the yah hoo pronunciation of the website.
And I used to know a guy who talked of "drawt" beer, not realizing the pronunciation of draught is draft. Is that nispronunciation increasingly common or decreasingly, relative to the use of draught inistead of draft?
I wish there was an oral equivalent to ngrams. There are companies that transcribe voice mail by computer and email it to you. That might not be a representative sample. The CIA, I've read, records and computer-analyses every phone call to or from DC. That might not be too representative either, and despite the World Factbook, the CIA is thought to be secretive. But I guess ngams aren't based on grocery lists, ransom notes or love letters packed in lunch bags; they are based on mass-produced publications.
deaconB said
There are companies that transcribe voice mail by computer and email it to you. That
I use Google Voice which sends me my voice mail along with a transcription. Reading these gives me my laugh of the day. Most of them are not even close to what was actually said. Of course the speakers were not speaking with the intention of being transcribed but if you want a large data base you'll need to use these kinds of conversations.
There are a few notable finds on Google books
infantesimal
infantesimal
This book on morphology - Morphological Aspects of Language Processing - references Norback and Norback (1974) in a footnote on this misspelling as the most common misspelling of infinitesimal. This assertion is suspicious to me, since I would suspect *infinitessimal to be much more common -- and a Google Ngrams supports that.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
1 Guest(s)