Talk:Rebracketing

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Mine Ed?

So what's the Ed? Mine => My is understandable but what it the original Ed that led to Ned. Khukri 12:49, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Edward, I believe. Raistlin11325 13:34, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
I'd like to see a citation, and not from some website. This "mine Ed" -> "my Ned" smells of cod etymology. Gordonofcartoon 13:53, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
If you look up some dictionaries, another good example might be "for the nonce" as a mistake for "for then ones"? Samantha of Cardyke 15:23, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge with Juncture Loss: What name to use?

The article Juncture loss covers much of the same territory, and clearly these must be merged. The section of English examples in that article is much stronger, though I feel the lead in rebracketing is clearer.

Before starting work on the merge, a question we need to decide is whether to name the combined article rebracketing or Juncture loss.

I encountered "rebracketing" in The Power of Babel by John McWhorter (2003), where he uses it as a fait accompli - as a well-understood technical term. I am not aware of sources that use the name "juncture loss". "Bracketing" is undoubtedly a very standard term for morphological chunking, and rebracketing is a often-used derivative technical term.

The Handbook of Word Formation, Springer, 2005, uses the term Rebracketing and does not refer to "Juncture Loss"(e.g. English Word-Formation Processes).

Googling is sometimes instructive, but is difficult here; just "juncture loss" gives a number of plastic moulding websites. But using the two variants along with "etymology" - I get:

  • "juncture loss" + etymology - 21 hits
  • "rebracketing" + etymology - 89 hits

The word "juncture loss" appears in some online etymology dictionaries (yourdictionary.com).

Rebracketing however, appears in a large number of linguistic journal articles:

And also in linguistic book reviews (elsevier), the linguist list archive, as well as websites on language etc.

So on the whole, it would seem that rebracketing perhaps has a stronger case. But clearly, there is room for some discussion on this issue. mukerjee (talk) 16:03, 26 August 2007 (UTC)