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

In article <h3flp4$hro$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
António Marques <m.ap@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Nathan Sanders wrote:

Peter is being unnecessarily obtuse and combative by completely
ignoring (forgetting? being woefully ignorant of?) how easy it is to
accommodate (phontactically licit) proper names, especially in
fictional contexts.

They are a completely different thing from real phrases of a language
substituted for difficult-to-understand heard phrases.

No, they aren't, because they are "real" phrases. Perhaps you mean
they aren't phrases composed of pre-existing words, which is a
completely different thing.

My point exactly.

Humans have no trouble accommodating novel words (otherwise, wug tests
and other nonce word experiments would have much more limited use),
especially when those words fill a proper name slot.

Names simply do not have to be pre-existing words in order to be
understood and incorporated into an utterance. I'm quite sure I'd
never heard of another Aniston before John Aniston (Jennifer's father,
who had changed his last name from Anastassakis), but I had no more
trouble understanding utterances containing his name than similar
utterances containing names I had heard before.

But the point isn't whether anyone has any trouble with it or not.
Obviously there is no trouble accomodating them, or they wouldn't be
used as a replacement. The point is that, while parsing the sentence,
you may either come up with a possible reading made of existing words,
or sweep all the bits you don't understand to under the 'proper name'
carpet. And the latter seems to me to be qualitatively different from
the former.

If so, then that just means there are two subtypes of mondegreens.
That doesn't change what the larger class of mondegreens is.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.

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