scholarly journals Comments on the spelling of ‘archaeopyle’, the germination aperture in dinoflagellate cysts

2007 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Feist-Burkhardt

Abstract. INTRODUCTIONDuring editorial work for the Journal of Micropalaeontology, a discussion arose between authors, reviewers and editors on the correct spelling of a technical term in palynology: ‘archeopyle’ or ‘archaeopyle’, the germination aperture in dinoflagellate cysts. One opinion was that there is only one correct spelling, namely ‘archeopyle’, with a single ‘e’ in the middle of the word, irrespective of the use of British English or American English. The other opinion was that spelling of the word should follow the language used in the rest of the text – allowing for ‘archeopyle’ with ‘e’ in American English and ‘archaeopyle’ with ‘ae’ in British English. This Notebook illustrates the reasons for this controversy and argues for the alternative spellings of the word according to American or British English spelling used.THE CAUSE OF THE ‘PROBLEM’ AND LINE OF ARGUMENTThe term ‘archeopyle’ was introduced in 1961 by William R. Evitt in one of his seminal papers on the morphology of fossil dinoflagellates, in which he recognized that many organic microfossils, then called ‘hystrichospheres’, showed a germination opening and were actually of dinoflagellate affinity. As derivation of the word he gave the following information: ‘... the presence of this opening (pyle – gate, orifice) in fossil (archeo – ancient) dinoflagellates ...’ (Evitt, 1961, p. 389). Since then, the term has become accepted and used widely by palaeontologists and biologists alike. Definitions and descriptions of the word itself and derivative terms can be looked up in the latest glossary of terminology by Williams et al. (2000). . . .

English Today ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Javier Calle–Martín

One of the problems of English spelling is the dual representation of the so-called ‘eyes’-words, rendered in discourse as -ise and -ize, both with high-frequency verbs such as modernise/modernize and rare coinages, as in burglarise/burglarize, etc. Eyes-words have historically evolved from two different language systems as two different forms with the same meaning, which have eventually come to coincide in their use in English with competing orthographic forms. The present paper first assesses the origin and development of the competition of these forms in the history of English from their introduction into English to their current configuration in British and American English; and then analyses their distribution in 13 varieties of English worldwide from the perspective of diatopic and text type variation. The study concludes, on the one hand, that the adoption of -ize in American English was an early 19th-century phenomenon while -ise spread in British English in the late 20th century; and, on the other, that the dissemination of -ize is constantly on the rise in many varieties, and the growing Americanisation of English, among others, is taken to be the most decisive element factor.


2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Hundt ◽  
Benedikt Szmrecsanyi

The literature suggests that animacy effects in present-day spoken New Zealand English (NZE) differ from animacy effects in other varieties of English. We seek to determine if such differences have a history in earlier NZE writing or not. We revisit two grammatical phenomena — progressives and genitives — that are well known to be sensitive to animacy effects, and we study these phenomena in corpora sampling 19th- and early 20th-century written NZE; for reference purposes, we also study parallel samples of 19th- and early 20th-century British English and American English. We indeed find significant regional differences between early New Zealand writing and the other varieties in terms of the effect that animacy has on the frequency and probabilities of grammatical phenomena.


Author(s):  
V. Yevchenko

The article focuses on the description of a special type of relationship that arises between lexical units within the corpus of English words in the framework of the sociolinguistic approach. Various ways of correlation between North American and British usages emerge in present-day English due to the action of two processes of the language development favoured by a set of historical, linguistic and sociolinguistic factors: divergence and convergence. The paper describes the most frequent forms of lexical correlation between North American English usage and British English usage. The research states that the semantic structure of the lexical unit or its register of usage can undergo changes under influences of the other variety. The lexemes, common to both national varieties with partial coincidence of the semantic structure and, sometimes, with shifts in the register of usage, are more affected by the process of convergence. The part of the English lexis less affected by convergent processes comprises common lexemes with the split in the semantic structure, the components of which are different or antonymic. The part of the present-day English lexis likely to be involved in the process of internal borrowing mostly includes lexemes specific to US English or British English with, or without lexical equivalents in the other variety. A special kind of correlation between lexical units of common origin can bring about usages functionally confined only to one variety. The functional predominance can contribute to the formation of different chains of synonyms actualized in each of the varieties. When lexemes have lexical equivalents specific to one of the national varieties of English, the so-called ''pseudo-synonymous relations” within the English lexical system can arise


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-74
Author(s):  
Matthias Hofmann

According to Alo and Mesthrie (2008), Nigerian English (NigE) becomes increasingly more influenced by American English (AmE), due to contact with American-trained professionals among other factors (cf. Gut 2008, Jowitt 1991). The online micro-blogging service Twitter offers potential communication with a vast number of English natives around the globe, using English in a vernacular usage domain, among other domains (or genres such as a news tweet vs a private tweet). With its foundation in 2006, Twitter is a new communication technology, which may indicate that it is used predominantly by “younger” urban people, and which may influence linguistic choices. The question I attempt to answer is whether Twitter influences NigE such that the British English (BrE) heritage of the country is contested by AmE influence. In this paper, I focus on the usage of prepositions and orthographic realizations of lemmata ending in -o(u)r, which can be categorized as BrE and AmE origin, respectively, in a NigE Twitter Corpus compiled in 2016-17 (13 mill. words). These features’ frequencies are contrasted with those of the Nigerian component of GloWbE (Davies 2013). Results from chi-squared tests suggest that AmE prepositions increasingly enter NigE Twitter discourse. Differences in spelling tend towards American English, but are not statistically significant. The only exception is the lemma labour, which is more often used in its British English spelling variant (χ2 = 26.30; df = 1; p one-tailed < 0.001).


1983 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
David K. Rycroft

Zimbabwean Ndebele and Zulu might be likened, in a very broad sense, to American English and British English, in their relationship. Mzilikazi and his few followers left Zululand in 1822, and in the 1840s founded a new nation, over 1,000 km. to the north. There are certain differences in pronunciation and tone. Divergence is likely to have been bilateral: while Ndebele shows clear signs of non-Zulu influence in certain respects, Zulu on the other hand is probably not quite the same today as it was in 1822


Author(s):  
John Robert SCHMITZ

ABSTRACT In a series of three articles published in the Journal of Pragmatics (1995, henceforth JP), the purpose of the papers is to question the division of English spoken in the world into, on one hand, "native" varieties (British English, American English. Australian English) and, on the other, "new/nonnative" varieties (Indian English, Singaporean English, Nigerian English). The JP articles are indeed groundbreaking for they mark one of the first interactions among scholars from the East with researchers in the West with regard to the growth and spread of the language as well as the roles English is made to play by its impressive number of users. The privileged position of prestige and power attributed to the inner circle varieties (USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) is questioned. Rajagopalan (1997, motivated by his reading of the JP papers, adds another dimension to this questioning by pointing to the racial and discriminatory stance underlying the notions "native speaker" and "nonnative speaker" (henceforth, respectively NS and NNS). Rajagopalan has written extensively on the issue of nativity or "nativeness"; over the years, Schmitz has also written on the same topic. There appears, in some cases, to be a number of divergent views with regard to subject on hand on the part of both authors. The purpose of this article is to engage in a respectful debate to uncover misreading and possible misunderstanding on the part of Schmitz. Listening to one another and learning from each another are essential in all academic endeavors.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 457-473
Author(s):  
Donny Vigil ◽  
Derrin Pinto

Abstract This experimental study sets out to determine whether people detect click sounds in American English. Recent research has documented the use of non-phonemic clicks in a variety of languages to fulfill a range of functions such as sequence management or signaling searches and different types of attitudinal stance. While these clicks are acoustically salient and have been reported to occur with a frequency of up to 14 per minute in British English, they have not been widely investigated until relatively recently. For this experiment, we designed video stimuli consisting of A and B pairs of approximately 10 seconds of speech, one with a click and the other with the click edited out. We gave 118 participants a questionnaire and asked if they could detect a difference between the pairs of videos. The results indicate that the majority of participants, between 79% and 86%, do not detect click sounds.


Corpora ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinyue Yao ◽  
Peter Collins

A number of recent studies of grammatical categories in English have identified regional and diachronic variation in the use of the present perfect, suggesting that it has been losing ground to the simple past tense from the eighteenth century onwards ( Elsness, 1997 , 2009 ; Hundt and Smith, 2009 ; and Yao and Collins, 2012 ). Only a limited amount of research has been conducted on non-present perfects. More recently, Bowie and Aarts’ (2012) study using the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English has found that certain non-present perfects underwent a considerable decline in spoken British English (BrE) during the second half of the twentieth century. However, comparison with American English (AmE) and across various genres has not been made. This study focusses on the changes in the distribution of four types of non-present perfects (past, modal, to-infinitival and ing-participial) in standard written BrE and AmE during the thirty-year period from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Using a tagged and post-edited version of the Brown family of corpora, it shows that contemporary BrE has a stronger preference for non-present perfects than AmE. Comparison of four written genres of the same period reveals that, for BrE, only the change in the overall frequency of past perfects was statistically significant. AmE showed, comparatively, a more dramatic decrease, particularly in the frequencies of past and modal perfects. It is suggested that the decline of past perfects is attributable to a growing disfavour for past-time reference in various genres, which is related to long-term historical shifts associated with the underlying communicative functions of the genres. The decline of modal perfects, on the other hand, is more likely to be occurring under the influence of the general decline of modal auxiliaries in English.


2018 ◽  
pp. 110-113
Author(s):  
О. Г. Гуль

Considering the significance and actuality of the Chinese syllables: their phonetic sounding and peculiarities of pronunciation, the proposed article will focus on the syllables which are regarded to be a difficult phonetic aspect. The main goal of this article is to become a brief guide of the correct and incorrect spelling for the Chinese syllables “ju”, “qu”, “xu” and “yu”, and to bring clearance into understanding of the necessity to spell the Chinese character correctly, in accordance with the basic phonetic laws. The article provides the rules of correct spelling, frequent spelling mistakes, syllable peculiarities and difficulties in understanding the main point of the statement, while being pronounces incorrectly. The article will reveal that the background of the issue is hidden in the formation of pinyin, and the consecutive process of its reformation and simplification. The information and research, provided in the article will be supported by the fundamental pinyin Chart, shown in two parallels: the original Chinese writing and spelling of the syllables, on the one hand and the spelling, offered by the Archimandrite Palladyi for the transcription and transliteration of the Chinese syllables into Cyrillic script, on the other.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amir Forouharfar

The paper was shaped around the pivotal question: Is SE a sound and scientific field of research? The question has given a critical tone to the paper and has also helped to bring out some of the controversial debates in the realm of SE. The paper was organized under five main discussions to be able to provide a scientific answer to the research question: (1)<b> </b>is “social entrepreneurship” an oxymoron?, (2) the characteristics of SE knowledge, (3) sources of social entrepreneurship knowledge, (4) SE knowledge: structure and limitations and (5) contributing epistemology-making concepts for SE.<b> </b>Based on the sections,<b> </b>the study relied on the relevant philosophical schools of thought in <i>Epistemology </i>(e.g. <i>Empiricism</i>, <i>Rationalism</i>, <i>Skepticism</i>, <i>Internalism</i> vs. <i>Externalism</i>,<i> Essentialism, Social Constructivism</i>, <i>Social Epistemology, etc.</i>) to discuss these controversies around SE and proposes some solutions by reviewing SE literature. Also, to determine the governing linguistic discourse in the realm of SE, which was necessary for our discussion,<i> Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)</i> for the first time in SE studies was used. Further, through the study, SE buzzwords which constitute SE terminology were derived and introduced to help us narrowing down and converging the thoughts in this field and demarking the epistemological boundaries of SE. The originality of the paper on one hand lies in its pioneering discussions on SE epistemology and on the other hand in paving the way for a construction of sound epistemology for SE; therefore in many cases after preparing the philosophical ground for the discussions, it went beyond the prevalent SE literature through meta-analysis to discuss the cases which were raised. The results of the study verified previously claimed embryonic pre-paradigmatic phase in SE which was far from a sound and scientific knowledge, although the scholarly endeavors are the harbingers of such a possibility in the future which calls for further mature academic discussion and development of SE knowledge by the SE academia.


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