Jul. 11th, 2003 01:10 pm
More perfect than perfect
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muckefuckThere's a language phenomenon which people in the field call overcorrection. This generally occurs when there is a distinction made in the standard form of a language that doesn't come naturally to some speakers. They aim for the norm, but sometimes overshoot it, correcting "errors" that aren't there. For instance, generations of schoolkids had it drilled in their heads that it's "You and I", not "Me and you", so now they (and their descendents) use "I" even when "I" is prescriptively appropriate--to the point where "between you and I" is becoming accepted usage (despite being fingernails on a chalkboard to grammar snobs like ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
caitalainn).
Overcorrection can also happen between languages. German has no distinction resembling the w/v distinction of English, so some German speakers regularly substitute v for w. In fact, this is a stereotypical feature of a German accent and many Germans try so hard to avoid it that they end up replacing almost all v's with w. (When I was a student in Germany, we teased Germans who did this by saying "There's a wiolent wampire inwading my willage.") My all-time favourite example of overcorrection comes from Germany, in fact. In the Rhineland, the distinction between sch (approximately English sh) and the "Ich-Laut" or "soft ch" (approximately English h in Hubert or human) is often weak or nonexistent. A German chemist once testified on sci.lang that he once heard a Rhenist colleague say "elektriche Zwichenchischt" for "elektrische Zwischenschicht" ("electric intermediate layer").
Today, I stumbled across what I think is a new example of overcorrection in current English. First, the "error". There's a growing tendency for past participial adjectives to lose the common -ed ending in certain compounds and collocations. This probably began in compounds like iced tea where the final d is assimilated to the initial t of tea. I have known a few people who clearly say /aIsttiI/, but, since geminate/long consonants aren't a usual feature of English, most simplify this to /aIstiI/. As a result, the spelling ice tea has been steadily gaining ground for years now. The change went on to affect other stop clusters (e.g. ice coffee) and even stop-fricative clusters (e.g. can food).
Now for the overcorrection: mixed tape. We always called 'em "mix tapes" (or "scams", though the later included all copied tapes, including single albums recorded in sequence), i.e. tapes of (music) mixes. My guess is that this started with people who know it's "mixed drink", not "mix drink" and wanted to avoid making the same "mistake" with "mix tape". But there's already 4,000+ hits in Google (ah, such a resource for the lazy lexicographer!) vs. c. 80,000 for "mix tape".
caitalainn).Overcorrection can also happen between languages. German has no distinction resembling the w/v distinction of English, so some German speakers regularly substitute v for w. In fact, this is a stereotypical feature of a German accent and many Germans try so hard to avoid it that they end up replacing almost all v's with w. (When I was a student in Germany, we teased Germans who did this by saying "There's a wiolent wampire inwading my willage.") My all-time favourite example of overcorrection comes from Germany, in fact. In the Rhineland, the distinction between sch (approximately English sh) and the "Ich-Laut" or "soft ch" (approximately English h in Hubert or human) is often weak or nonexistent. A German chemist once testified on sci.lang that he once heard a Rhenist colleague say "elektriche Zwichenchischt" for "elektrische Zwischenschicht" ("electric intermediate layer").
Today, I stumbled across what I think is a new example of overcorrection in current English. First, the "error". There's a growing tendency for past participial adjectives to lose the common -ed ending in certain compounds and collocations. This probably began in compounds like iced tea where the final d is assimilated to the initial t of tea. I have known a few people who clearly say /aIsttiI/, but, since geminate/long consonants aren't a usual feature of English, most simplify this to /aIstiI/. As a result, the spelling ice tea has been steadily gaining ground for years now. The change went on to affect other stop clusters (e.g. ice coffee) and even stop-fricative clusters (e.g. can food).
Now for the overcorrection: mixed tape. We always called 'em "mix tapes" (or "scams", though the later included all copied tapes, including single albums recorded in sequence), i.e. tapes of (music) mixes. My guess is that this started with people who know it's "mixed drink", not "mix drink" and wanted to avoid making the same "mistake" with "mix tape". But there's already 4,000+ hits in Google (ah, such a resource for the lazy lexicographer!) vs. c. 80,000 for "mix tape".
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I try so hard not to correct other people's grammar and spelling outside of work. It's very difficult.
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To combat this, I try to hang out with people whose grammar doesn't need correcting, or who LIKE it. (J, for some reason, thinks it's cute when I poke him and say "whom." He's a freak.)
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Speakers of rhotic dialects perform another kind of overcorrection when they mock this overcorrection, producing bogus pronunciations like "Copercabaner" or Canader was.
Re:
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People talk funny.
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[point] *grunt*
(I was a linguistics student once...)
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Nevair! Call ze Académie Française! Oh wait, no...er...um...I know the One True Path lies somewhere in the middle between prescriptivism and descriptivism, but some things jest ain't right! Among these are "between you and I", "nuke-yuh-lurr" (Sorry, I do not remember my IPA phonetics) and "frig" (cf. "fridge").
I haven't yet seen "ice tea" or "ice coffee", though these might be argued to be terminological shifts rather than examples of overcorrection. "Ice tea" could reasonably be said to be the name of a drink made by pouring tea over ice, much in the same way "paprikash" is the name of a dish made by cooking chicken in a paprika sauce or "florentine" is the name of a dish made with spinach. It strikes me that "iced tea" and "ice tea" are merely two ways (nominative and descriptive) of indicating a particular prepared drink. If this theory's valid, then either term would be correct.
As for "mix tape" vs. "mixed tape", Eek! "Mix tape" is correct, of course, as it is a tape that contains a mix, much as a "jazz tape" is a tape that contains jazz. "Mixed tape" would seem to me appropriate only in the plural when used synonymously with "assorted" ("Mixed tapes: 25¢/ea").
I'm reminded of a tangentially-relevant instance in which a garden store in Denver had a sign posted about a week before Halloween, advertising the availability of "Corn Stock's". I had to read it out loud before I realised what they meant.
I cannot comment on your German example, because my German pronunciation is only slightly more existent than my German grammar, and my German vocabulary is strictly limited to the terms of my industry.
/aIsttiI/ vs. /aIstiI/: Well, yeah! Happens all the time. Ask the folks over at Tufts University about how the second "t" is scarcely ever pronounced.
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I think they might be reinterpreted as terminological shifts and thereby extended by analogy, but I think their origin is in assimilatory sound change. (Note that I didn't say ice tea was a result of overcorrection; it's the necessary error that forms the basis for the overcorrection found in "mix tape".)
For your theory to work, it would require some examples of noun-noun compounds with "ice" as the first element which would then be extended by analogy to "iced" + noun compounds. That is, if "ice milk" and "ice cream" were drinks composed of ice and milk and ice and cream (respectively), then there would be precedent for "ice tea" and "ice coffee" naming drinks composed of ice and tea or ice and coffee. But they're not: They're dessert foods made from milk and cream which are frozen to give them the character of ice. The proper extension would be to ice-like desserts made from frozen tea and coffee--a far cry from "iced tea" and "ice coffee" as I've ever encountred them.
Your other examples are very different in origin. "Paprikash", for instance, is a standard case of adjective nominalisation. (Hungarian paprika + s (relational suffix) -> paprikás "having to do with [i.e. cooked with] paprika" -> "a dish cooked with paprika".) Same with "florentine" (i.e. "a dish cooked in the florentine manner"). The head noun "dish" is understood and, thus, dropped. Other examples would be the names for various sausages--wieners, franfurters, thueringers--where the absent head noun is "sausage". An analogous form of derivation would leave us with "iced" as the name for a beverage made by icing some potable substance. (Cf. names of coffee drinks, like [caffè] espresso, [caffè] macchiato, [caffè] latte--latte is simply Italian for "milk". That last name couldn't be used in Italy, except perhaps where the context were very clear, but works fine in the U.S. where "latte" is intimately associated with caffè latte.)
I've come to accept the variants ice tea and ice coffee, since they're basically unambiguous. I balk at accepting mixed tape for the same reason as you do--in my mind, it contrasts with mix tap.
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I think you're probably right. My comment on terminological shifts was made from an a posteriori standpoint: The new terms are here, we may as well figure out if they're legitimate or not.
I do not agree, though, that liquid-over-ice analogies are necessarily required to legitimise "ice coffee" and "ice tea". As I'm sure you know, noun-noun compounds in English can be nearly identical in their structure and component referents (in this case ice and a liquid) and yet have notoriously disparate phrasal referents (a drink over ice in the case of "ice coffee", a drink processed with ice in the case of "ice wine"). And let us not forget that "iced cream" is still in common use in English (dictionary.com says "Iced cream. Same as Ice cream") and is the only term in other languages (viz. French "crème glacée"). By the obverse of your theory, the "iced cream" construction would abrade the "iced coffee" construction because one is a frozen dessert that involves no liquid and the other is a liquid poured over ice...
My other examples were indeed very different in origin—that's why I used them, to show how very disparate evolutionary paths can lead to very similar lexical constructions.
All this and four centuries of the umlaut, too! 8^{)}
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