Superseding “Supersede.”

Anne Curzan at Lingua Franca reports on a spelling challenge the graduate-student instructor for her introductory English linguistics course had given to students: Which irregular spellings are you willing to part with? One of the suggestions was supersede; Curzan is sold, and I find myself willing to accept the wildly popular (mis)spelling supercede. Sure, it’s historically unjustifiable (to supersede is, etymologically speaking, to sit on), but so what? Plenty of English words have opaque etymologies (to take one common example, the -h- in author has no justification other than 16th-century whimsy), and the model of words like intercede appears to be irresistibly attractive. So let people spell it that way if they like.

I also don’t mind indite for indict (particularly since the –ct is pronounced in interdict — it’s just too confusing). But vacume for vacuum? No, no, a thousand times no. Not only does it look stupid, there are still people who pronounce it with three syllables, including me when it isn’t part of the phrase vacuum cleaner (I picked up that particular bit of pedantry from the late Indo-Europeanist Warren Cowgill, who had the misfortune to try to supervise my wretched attempt at a dissertation four decades ago).

Comments

  1. Well, I will be go to hell. I have been saying interdyte most of my life, and indeed on checking the OED this very spelling is found from Middle English times until the 17C, suggesting that a /k/-less pronunciation with a long vowel was in use back then. But of course I pronounce interdiction like diction.

    Note that indite is a separate verb meaning ‘to put into words’, and by extension ‘to write down’. But indict is far more common, and they have the same origin anyway: I’m quite happy to let them become a case of polysemy rather than homonymy.

    In general, I am willing and indeed eager to abandon all irregular spellings, and indeed all regular but rare spellings that don’t make distinctions significant to anyone living. So let vein be spelled like vain, and let’s write captain as capten, so it doesn’t look like retain.

  2. Interdict pronouncing the ct? No no no.

    Baffled and plagued by a mind that every hour
    Turns recreant to her task; takes heart again,
    Then feels immediately some hollow thought
    Hang like an interdict upon her hopes.

    Absolutely has to be interdyte.

  3. For indict, my preference would be to change it to a fully French “endite” (mentioned in the linked article). But “in-“vs. “en-” doesn’t really matter. I agree “vacume” is silly.

    In general, there are tons of irregular spellings in English that really have no discernible purpose or value. It’s not a large group relative to the other words in the language (spelling reformers often greatly exaggerate this and ignore the existence of many regularly-spelled words), but it is large relative to most other alphabetically-spelled languages.

    The final “c” in zinc has always seemed an unnecessary irregularity to me, even if it is possible to imagine some justification for it like saying that it represents a Latinization of the German form. Also, I wouldn’t mind if “quay” went extinct and was replaced with “key.”

    This next one would never catch on, but I think it’d save people a lot of pointless trouble if we respelled the -ceive and -cei(p)t words with -ceve and -cete. And I think it looks just as nice.

  4. Absolutely has to be interdyte.

    Check your dictionary, my friend.

  5. I’m perfectly happy with supercede, and also miniscule, while we’re at it.

  6. Yeah, that’s another good candidate.

  7. “I also don’t mind indite for indict (particularly since the –ct is pronounced in interdict — it’s just too confusing).”

    No no no it’s the c which *prevents* confusion, by showing the reader that the words are related.

    It may seem like mission creep for a spelling to include some etymological trivia, but it has its charm, like that aunt who, in the middle of an anecdote, always digresses into another one.

  8. I’m all about the etymological trivia, obviously, and I prefer to keep all spellings just as they are; this is about which changes I would have the least resistance to.

  9. Indict being essentially a term of art, is well protected from any changes.

  10. Alon Lischinsky says

    @D.O.: but it’s the kind of term of art that has currency with the general public. A large majority of the instances of indict in (for example) COCA come from news reporting rather than legal texts.

  11. Oh, I disagree, Molly. The spelling “indict” might associate the word with another which is etymologically related, but it dissociates the word’s spelling from its pronunciation, and that is a more pertinent issue, I think.

    I would gladly undo all the vandalism certain people wrought upon English words to establish a needless link between their spelling and the spellings of foreign words, even if the latter might be etymologically related to the former. At any rate, I would gladly do so if, in the process, the changes broke the more useful links between spelling and pronunciation, and between the spellings of related English words.

    Let “receipt” lose its p, and once again match “conceit” and “deceit”. Let “debt”, “doubt”, “redoubt” and “ptarmigan” lose their silent letters.

    “Supersede” might look anomalous but at least it is consistent with the pronunciation and relates to its Latin ancestor. More anomalous, though, are “exceed”, “proceed” and “succeed”, which match each other but fail to match “recede”, “secede” and “intercede” — and even “procedure”.

    “Height” would be better spelt “hight”, which better accords with the pronunciation, because the letter-sequence “eight” is in almost all cases pronounced as in “eight” — “hight” also makes a pertinent link to “high”.

    “Gauge” would be better as “gage” — in what other English word is the FACE vowel spelt “au”?

    Let’s also sort out “licence” and “practice” — or should the c be s? The c/s variation is a difference without a useful distinction, so why not simplify matters and make the last consonant consistently s?

    “Judgement” needs that first e to show that the g is soft. Likewise “acknowledgement”.

    But I think I’d want only modest reforms in spelling, where the change wouldn’t make words harder to read. I wouldn’t want to touch e.g. “its”, “it’s”, “your” or “you’re”, even though misspellings of them are among the most frequent.

  12. Alon Lischinsky, yes, of course, but it is media coverage of legal proceedings and it must follow legal jargon.

  13. David Marjanović says

    “Judgement” needs that first e to show that the g is soft. Likewise “acknowledgement”.

    This e happens to be redundant behind dg, as Noah Webster correctly observed.

  14. No way am I giving of some of my favorite lines for any damn dictionary, Hat 🙂

  15. Whether there should be an “e” after “dg” is something that still trips me up. And the spelling of “minuscule.”

  16. I’ve seen “gage” in printed documents going back to the 1950s, I’m fine with that one. No risk of confusion with the fruit.

    “vane”, “vein”, “vain” I think has a useful purpose.

    “Comptroller” is another one I think could be changed.

  17. I’ve seen “gage” in printed documents going back to the 1950s, I’m fine with that one.

    Yes, that passes my acceptability test as well.

  18. For me, the plum meaning of “gage” does not exist as part of my idiolect. However, the meaning of a valuable item left as marker for a debt or obligation is still quite salient. (It’s where we get “mortgage,” a word that’s neen much on my mind as I am about to sell my old house.)

    I also like it as a respelling of “gauge” as well.

  19. Some people (mostly in East Anglia) pronounce vane (FACE) differently from vane/vein (STRAIT), so I don’t want to merge that. But vein, rein, reign, deign, feign, sheik, veil, beige are pretty much the only words where ei is used for the STRAIT vowel rather than the FLEECE vowel, and that seems an unnecessary complication.

  20. At the risk of horrifying Classics readers, I could live with losing ad nauseam/-um as a shibboleth. Liquify and putrify also make the cut, and maybe even publically.

  21. Dictionaries already list publically as a standard variant.

  22. @John: Collins, M-W, and the OED do, but it’s not listed by Oxford Dictionaries, Macmillan, or Cambridge, and the American Heritage Dictionary calls it nonstandard. So there isn’t a consensus.

  23. To me ad nauseum won’t fly. It’s not as if such words exist in a vacume.

  24. For nearly a dozen years I supported an industry-leader product data management software package that spelled the workflow step superceded out of the box and could not be changed (because of the internal workflows that used it). For more training classes than I could count, I apologised for the spelling error to engineers who looked at me for two seconds like I was crazy because they had noticed nothing wrong at all. That is, except for the lovely young lady who came up to me after class and gushed, “Are you on the spectrum? Because I am totally a person with Asperger’s and I can tell you are too because you’re so easy for people like me to understand; I noticed first when you were such a spelling nerd, me too”.

    Five years after that day, incidentally, I was found to be on the spectrum, but that’s beside the point, lol.

  25. Absolutely has to be interdyte.

    I think I meant to say this six years ago but forgot: how on earth is “Hang like an interdict upon her hopes” relevant to the issue? I mean, it probably “sounds better” with “interdyte” if that’s what you’re used to, but that’s because that’s what you’re used to! To me, it sounds fine with the pronunciation I’m used to.

  26. David Eddyshaw says

    “Fantasy” seems to have decisively won the battle against “phantasy”, at least outside of self-consciously precious contexts. I wonder how that came about, given that lots of quite everyday words are still written with “ph”? (As indeed are “phantom” and “phantasm”, though not “fantastic” …)

  27. January First-of-May says

    “Height” would be better spelt “hight”, which better accords with the pronunciation, because the letter-sequence “eight” is in almost all cases pronounced as in “eight”

    …wait, “height” doesn’t rhyme with “eight”? I always kind of thought it was. (Which would have made it homophonous with “hate”, I guess.)

  28. OED:

    The stem-vowel has generally been ē, ey, ei, though forms in i occur from 13th cent., especially in northern writers, hicht being the typical Scottish form from 14th cent.; in English hight is found from 15th cent., and was very common in 16th and 17th centuries; highth was also very common in 17th cent. and was the form used by Milton. The hei- forms come lineally down from Old English (Anglian héhþo); the hi- forms are due in the main to later assimilation to high adj. Current usage is a compromise, retaining the spelling height (which has been by far the most frequent written form since 1500), with the pronunciation of hight.
    N.E.D. (1898) enters this under the double headword height, highth but gives only the pronunciation (həiþ) /haɪθ/.

    Now that I think of it, that is odd: why would such an unintuitive spelling win out when you’d think the influence of the adjective would pull it toward hight?

  29. >“Fantasy” seems to have decisively won the battle against “phantasy”, at least outside of self-consciously precious contexts. I wonder how that came about

    I was expecting the 1940 Disney movie Fantasia was going to be the answer, but Fantasy seems to have pulled ahead in 1820, so suddenly and decisively that there must have been some sort of pop culture reason for it.

    https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fantasia%2C+phantasia&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3

    Edited – actually, given what google is measuring, pop culture may not be the appropriate. But some sort of fenomenon in popular English literature

  30. >“Comptroller” is another one I think could be changed.

    Illinois has an elected official with this title and the p is pronounced. Some hit it hard as COMP-troller, while others just brush past it as cum(p)-TROLL-er, but it’s always there. I worked for a the campaign of a woman who became the first female statewide elected official.

    I literally never heard anyone say controller. I’m pretty sure if I tried to pronounce it that way publically, the Cook County State’s Attorney would issue a superceding inditement against me.

  31. January First-of-May says

    Edited – actually, given what google is measuring, pop culture may not be the appropriate.

    Judging by the search results, what you’re seeing on Google is fantasia “improvisational musical composition”, a borrowing from Italian. Similar concept, different route to English.

  32. >Some people (mostly in East Anglia) pronounce vane (FACE) differently from vane/vein (STRAIT),

    JC, I couldn’t find any help online… what is the STRAIT vowel you refer to? I pronounce it with the FACE vowel. I assume you meant “vain” before the forward slash, but I’m still not sure of a vowel that would be in strait and vain/vein but not fane.

    And editing this to thank JFoM for the comment on fantasia.

  33. “Eight” rhymes with “Haight”, not “Height”, because English spelling is easy.

  34. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    FWIW, I think I picked up height with FACE very early on, and I never noticed the discrepancy with the PRICE of high before now. Length and breadth are even more different from long and broad so I probably just learned this class of words separately. (Length, width and breadth are actually more like my native Danish equivalents than is the case for the base adjectives, and in Danish this is not a productive derivation either so there was no reason to look for a pattern).

    Danish has højde to høj; communis opinio seems to be that the regular development of *hauhiþō would have been †hød (with an approximant) or something like that, but the base adjective and analogy to words like længde. vidde and bredde kept it in the shape we have now. Same in Swedish except different (högd, hög, längd, vidd, bredd).

  35. David Marjanović says

    Freight does have FACE, though. Maybe that’s to keep it distinct from fright?

  36. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    Oh, I forgot to ask: What did Standard German do with all the *-iþō nouns? Höhe looks like something else.

  37. PlasticPaddy says

    Hoheit?

  38. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    That would seem to be *hauhaz + *haiduz; Danish højhed where -hed loaned from LG is also at least semi-productive, so it could be loaned entire or formed in Danish.

    Höhe < *hauhį̄, it seems.

  39. What did Standard German do with all the *-iþō nouns?
    No idea. But Low German has them, e.g. höchte, and at least some made it into Early Modern German, e.g. Liebde “love”, which was used in the Rhenish dialects and made it into the standard from there as part of the addesss Euer Liebde(n); that fell out of use in the 19th century.

  40. >Pane–pain merger

    I apologize for daftness, but I’m still not getting what these sound like unmerged.

    From the wiki that was linked
    >long mid monophthong /eː/ and the diphthong /ei/

    Is this monophtong PEN? I can’t think of a value of “monopthong /eː/” between PEN and FACE that is phonemic and not foreign. I’m not even sure which of pane/pain would be the monopthong and which the dipthong.

    The only dialect I can think of that has room for a distinction would be that of the elderly Fulham supporter who confirmed I was in the right place, in Row A (which perversely was 7 rows back of the front row), by looking at my ticket and reading “row ai.” I guess he’d have the FACE vowel available for one of the two words. Not that I am all that acquainted with old-country dialects.

  41. PlasticPaddy says

    @ryan
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UTVwdv9Pzo8
    Between 1.30 and 1.50 (song about tabby cat)
    there is “chasing” and “stairs”. For me “chasing” is more like ā+i and “stairs” is more like æ + i.
    @hans, lars:
    Gemeinde and Gegend are apparently survivors in modern German:
    https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:German_terms_suffixed_with_-de

  42. Is this monophtong PEN? I can’t think of a value of “monopthong /eː/” between PEN and FACE that is phonemic and not foreign.

    That’s because the merger is almost universal in modern English. Unless you’ve been talking to old folks in Norfolk or the Welsh valleys, you probably have never heard anyone who doesn’t have it.

    I’m not sure what vowel you have in pen. [e] does not exist in most American accents, but it’s the typical RP realisation of the DRESS vowel.

    I’m not even sure which of pane/pain would be the monopthong and which the dipthong.

    Pane would be the monophthong. Words with the diphthong are usually written with ai ~ ay ~ ei ~ ey.

  43. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    @PP, thanks. I guess it’s just a coincidence that the ones that are preserved in English and Scandinavian got replaced in HG, and vice versa, so there are no shared examples left.

  44. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    But is seems you can still say Längde in Berlin, even though it’s marked as obsolete in the Standard (which uses Länge < *langį̄ instead). Those *-in stems seems to be missing from North Germanic, though, Some were in ME it says, but since lost — that could be why so many *-iþō formations survived in Scandinavian and English. Just guessing.

  45. @PP: Thanks for the list. I clearly didn’t think hard enough about words where the suffix is in use yesterday.
    But is seems you can still say Längde in Berlin
    I don’t think I ever heard it used when I was in Berlin, but that doesn’t have to mean anything. But note that, strictly speaking, Berlinerisch is a Low German dialect that underwent heavy Standard German influence, and that Längde is therefore probably a survivor from the Low German core lexicon.

  46. David Marjanović says

    I apologize for daftness, but I’m still not getting what these sound like unmerged.

    Have you heard Fiona Hill’s am[ɛː]zing FACE vowel? I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it’s unmerged with STRAIT.

    [e] does not exist in most American accents, but it’s the typical RP realisation of the DRESS vowel.

    It was – at the fringe of living memory. Today it is found in South Africa, New Zealand and to a lesser extent Australia. At least half the dictionaries just haven’t bothered to update their transcriptions; after all, nothing has changed on the phonemic level.

  47. David Marjanović says

    Also, I wouldn’t mind if “quay” went extinct and was replaced with “key.”

    Oh, is that how it’s pronounced? And does that explain the Florida Keys?

  48. @David Marjanović: You might think that, but the words turn out to be unrelated. Key is from Spanish cay, in turn from a local Arawakan word. Quay is from French, originally from a Celtic word for an enclosure; apparently it’s a doublet with hedge.

  49. Ryan: if you’re not familiar with IPA symbols, go to Help:IPA first. I also like the introduction at the History of English Podcast to English vowels, and the following episodes on the Great Vowel Shift. Also look up “Lexical set” to see why we’re putting some words in all-caps, it’s not just to quote them.

    I’m not even sure which of pane/pain would be the monopthong and which the dipthong.

    That’s in the paragraphs right before and right after the one you quoted: pane was the monophthong.

    Alon: [e] does not exist in most American accents,

    (to Americans it will sound closest to the FACE diphthong, but without the off-glide)

    … but it’s the typical RP realisation of the DRESS vowel.

    I don’t think that’s the best way to explain it to a beginner, since that use of the symbol e is contentious. I think Ryan would be helped more by the Help:IPA page, Cardinal vowels, and the individual pages linked from there on [e] (Close-mid front unrounded vowel) and [ɛ] (Open-mid front unrounded vowel: the American DRESS vowel).

    David M: It was – at the fringe of living memory. … At least half the dictionaries just haven’t bothered to update their transcriptions; after all, nothing has changed on the phonemic level.

    Specifically, most British dictionaries (which generally do use IPA) have not updated their transcriptions; most American dictionaries don’t use IPA, they each cook up their own transcription schemes.

    However, the OED does use [ɛ] for the DRESS vowel, and already did when they converted to IPA in 1989.

  50. David Marjanović says

    (to Americans it will sound closest to the FACE diphthong, but without the off-glide)

    The Canadian FACE monophthong, also found in various northern parts of the US. And in Scotland.

  51. Thanks to everyone who tried to explain. I’ll check schwarz’s link when I’m on a laptop. .

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