Re: Is it really true that native English speakers cannot tell 'skill' and 'sgill' apart?

António Marques wrote:
On Jul 12, 6:27 pm, Harlan Messinger
<hmessinger.removet...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Every example except the original one and the Ranetti one is of a
hearer making sense of something difficult by replacing it with an
expression that makes sense in the language, not by making up a
nonsensical proper name.
"Mondegreen" and "Ranetti", whether or not they exist, are not
nonsensical--there is no reason why they couldn't exist as proper
names

But it's true that that tells us nothing, because 'proper names' are
an open class admitting pretty much any string of syllables (even if
they have to conform to the language's phonetics, it is obvious that
the hearer wouldn't come up with a string that didn't conform). This
way, proper names are kind of snake oil in this context. I for one do
find that replacement with a grammatical expression feels different
from replacement with an arbitrary string. But then again, of course,
mondegreen and ranetti do sound like echt proper names.

and there is nothing about them that causes the perceived lyrics
not to make sense.

I think the objection is that it is one phenomenon to replace a phrase
by another, and a different phenomenon to replace a phrase by a
meaningless string of syllables and call the latter a proper name.

You're speaking of this, as Peter does, as though it's planned in advance, and as though the person planning it is doing it in a foolish way. If I perceive the lyrics of a song to be such-and-such, then those are what I perceive them to be. If someone *actually* says to me "I had lunch with Dave Picolas yesterday" then I perceive him to have said that he had lunch with someone named Dave Picolas yesterday, even if I've never heard the name Picolas in my life. If I hear Billy Joel singing about "Brenda Ranetti", then I don't consider whether I've ever heard that name before. "Brenda Ranetti" is what I heard. It isn't that I'm hearing a string of syllables that I'm perceiving to be meaningless, and then, for the sake of being able to call the thing a mondegreen, claiming it to be a proper name. I perceived it right off the bat as a proper name.

If the actual lyrics are "Brenda and Eddie", well, fine, but "Brenda Ranetti" is what I heard. I didn't plan it; I didn't assess whether it made sense in any of the ways Peter desperately wants to believe it needs to make sense in order to be considered a legitimate mondegreen. That's what I heard, and therefore that's the mondegreen I produced.
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