Information AboutHypercorrection |
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IN ENGLISH Unlike some Languages , such as French and German , English has no single supreme authoritative body that governs whether any given usage will fall into the category ''correct'' or ''incorrect''. Nonetheless, within certain groups of users of English, some of which are quite large, certain usages are indeed considered either (1) unduly elaborate adherence to formal rules instead of rules of popular, widespread, or common usage or (2) mis- or ill-informed changing of ''correct'', but seemingly ''informal'', usage into wording that is ''incorrect'' but seemingly ''formal''. Preposition at the end of a clause An anecdote often attributed to : Churchill went beyond creating a grammatically correct sentence to mock the elaborate refusal to end a clause in a preposition (or insistence on placing the preposition before the relative pronoun); he treated two adverbs, ''up'' and ''with'', as prepositions. The two words actually modify ''put'', and their placement before the verb is extremely unusual. Personal pronouns Jack Lynch, assistant professor of English at Rutgers University , in New Jersey , describes another example of hypercorrection: :We're taught as children, and beginning language learners are told, you don't say 'me and you went to the movies.' It should be 'you and I.' And a lot of people, therefore, internalize the rule that 'you and I' is somehow more proper, and they end up using it in places where they shouldn't — such as 'he gave it to you and I' when it should be 'he gave it to you and me'. {Link without Title} Another form of pronoun hypercorrection seems to originate in the speaker's or writer's desire to appear educated or refined rather than in understanding of the usual usage of pronouns. It is the use of uses of the reflexive pronoun as subject and (2) all non- Appositive uses of the reflexive pronoun as object when the object is not the same person or thing as the subject. For example,
(Appositive use of reflexive pronouns is not hypercorrection: e.g., "''I, myself, went shopping''", "''Sam gave '''you, yourself,''' a gift''", "''Joe heard '''me, myself,''' in the kitchen''", and "''The '''students, themselves,''' are intelligent''".) Phonemes Hypercorrection also occurs when a colloquial dialect differs in pronunciation from the standard. For example, because standard American English is a Rhotic dialect (requiring the pronunciation of syllable-final ''-r''), speakers of regional non-rhotic dialects often overcompensate for the loss of syllable-final ''-r'' by pronouncing some words ending in vowels as if there actually were an extra ''-r'' at the end (for example, pronouncing ''idea'' as "''idear''" ). Similarly, individuals who generally pronounce both ''t'' and ''d'' with an may, in an attempt to overformalize, pronounce ''lady'' as ''laty''. Another example of phonetic hypercorrection occurs when speakers from the North of England move south, and pronounce ''sugar'' as if it were spelled "shugger", to assonate with the Received Pronunciation ''butter''. Perhaps the most notorious example is the pronunciation of the name of the letter ''H'' as "haitch" ( {Link without Title} ) in an effort to avoid the perceived vulgarism of " Dropping ''H''s ". Plurals
All of these words take the regular English inflection in ''-s'' or ''-es'', but a few of the hypercorrected forms have passed into such common usage as to be considered acceptable by some, despite their origins. Yet more hypercorrection deals with the pronunciation of the ''-es'' plural forms of certain English nouns. Although the most common way of pluralizing a noun in English is to add ''-s'' or ''-es'' to the end of the singular form, there are many exceptions. One such exception involves some words whose singular forms end in ''-is'' and the plurals of which are formed simply by the ''replacement'' of ''-is'' with ''-es'': e.g., ''crisis'' and ''crises'', ''neurosis'' and ''neuroses'', ''prosthesis'' and ''prostheses'', ''testis'' and ''testes'', ''diagnosis'' and ''diagnoses''. The standard pronunciation of such plurals has the final syllable equivalent to the sound of the English word ''ease'' [iːz]. Yet, some speakers use the same ''ease'' [iːz] pronunciation for the ''-es'' endings of nouns whose plurals are formed in the ''ordinary'' way, by the ''addition'' of ''-es'': e.g., ''processes'' (plural of ''process'') and ''biases'' (plural of ''bias''). The correct pronunciations of words such as ''processes'' and ''biases'' have the final syllable equivalent to that of ''houses'' and ''witches'': [əz]. Room for confusion exists in some homographic plurals, where the final "-es" pronunciation depends on the word's meaning. For example, ''axes'' is pronounced as the plural of ''axis'', but [æksəz as the plural of ''axe''. The pronunciation of ''bases'' similarly depends on whether its singular is ''basis'' or ''base''. Hypercorrective replacement of with [iːz in plurals may result partly from confusion over these homographs. Hyperforeignism When pronunciation and spelling of foreign loan words are based on rules that apply to ''other'' foreign words but not to those in question, the phenomenon is hyperforeignism. The following are examples. One might conclude that, as the ''-s'' is silent in '' Mardi Gras '', '' Coup De Grâce '' is pronounced ; it is actually . Similarly some speakers omit the last consonant in '' Vichyssoise ''. Many native speakers of English pronounce the word '' Lingerie '' as , stressing the first or the last syllable, excessively depressing the first vowel to sound more like a "typical" French nasal vowel, and rhyming the final syllable with English ''ray'', by analogy with the many French loanwords ending in ''-é''(''e''), ''-er'', ''-et'', and ''-ez''. A closer English approximation of the native French would be . Many, perhaps most, English speakers pronounce '' Machismo '' as on the analogy of other learned or foreign-derived words in which ''ch'' is rendered in English: for example, ''anarchism'', ''architect'', ''masochism'', ''maccheroni'' (''macaroni''). The Spanish ''ch'' in ''machismo'' is properly pronounced in the same way as ''ch'' in English ''chair'' . Some English-speakers pronounce '' Beijing '' with a French ''j'' , even though the Mandarin Chinese sound represented by the ''j'' in Pinyin is closer to the English ''j'' . Similar hyperforeignism is in the pronunciation of the ''j'' in the name of the Taj Mahal , often rendered but more properly pronounced (as it is in most other Roman-alphabet spellings of words associated with languages of India ). Another example is the pronunciation of '' Punjab '' as ; in the Anglo-Indian spelling convention, Hindi 's neutral vowel is represented by the letter ''u'' with a sound similar to that of the ''u'' in English ''cup'' . The Italian musical term ''mezzo'' is pronunced in in Italian, but is often rendered by speakers from other linguistic backgrounds.
Unintentional misuse of diacritics should not, however, be confused with intentional misuse, or use without concern for traditional function, as in the Heavy-metal Umlaut . IN OTHER LANGUAGES West South Slavic languages The syllables ''je'' and ''ije'' appear in Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin speech where Serbian has only variation in quality (length of the vowel) of ''e''. Not every Serbian ''e'' becomes ''je'' or ''ije'' in the other West Balkan countries. Serbs who try to disguise their rearing often fail miserably, either undersupplying or oversupplying ''je''s and ''ije''s. Chinese languages provided using Jyutping ). Prescriptivists tend to consider these changes as substandard and denounce them for being "lazy sounds" (懶音). However, in a case of hypercorrection, some speakers have started pronouncing words that should have a null initial using an initial ''ng-'', even though according to Historical Chinese Phonology , only words with ''Yang'' Tone s (which correspond to tones 4, 5, and 6 in Cantonese) had Voiced initials (which includes ''ng-''). Words with ''Yin'' tones (1, 2, and 3) historically should have unvoiced or null initials. Because of this hypercorrection, words such as the word ''oi3'' (愛, meaning "love"), which has a ''Yin'' tone, are pronounced by speakers with an ''ng-'' initial, ''ngoi3''. German In German , the dialect spoken in the city of Düsseldorf and its surroundings heavily features 'ch' sounds where a High German accent calls for 'sch' [ʃ sounds. Speakers with this accent would say 'Fich' instead of 'Fisch' [fɪʃ (fish), and 'Tich' instead of 'Tisch' [tɪʃ (table). This is due to a hypercorrection of the Rhineland accent prevalent in that area of Germany, an accent that replaces many 'ch' sounds with 'sch' [ʃ sounds, making for a colourful accent often considered simple or vulgar by speakers of High German. Attempting to avoid this error, speakers of the Düsseldorf accent hypercorrect it to an abundance of 'ch' [ç]. Hebrew and Yiddish Careful Hebrew speakers are taught to avoid the colloquial pronunciation of "bediyyuq" (exactly) as . Many speakers accordingly pronounce "lihyot" (to be) as if it were spelled "lehiyyot" (), though there is no grammatical justification for doing so. Hypercorrection can work in both directions. It is well known that the vowel '' Qamatz Gadol '', which in the accepted Sephardic pronunciation is rendered as , becomes in Ashkenazi Hebrew . Many older British Jews therefore consider it more colloquial and "down-home" to say "Shobbes" and "motza", though the vowel in these words is in fact a '' Patach '', which is rendered as in both Sephardi and Ashkenazi Hebrew. |