Talk:Rebracketing

A fact from Rebracketing appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 20 July 2007. The text of the entry was as follows: Did you know... that the nickname Ned arose from an instance of rebracketing, as children interpreted the term of endearment "mine Ed" as "my Ned"? A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Did you know archive/2007/July.

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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)[reply]

Edward, I believe. Raistlin11325 13:34, 20 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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:

• Trans. Philological Society,
• Journal of English Linguistics,
• Australian J of Linguistics,
• J. American Speech

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)[reply]

Going ahead and boldly doing the merge, using the name 'rebracketing'. 4pq1injbok (talk) 02:20, 23 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I hear this quite frequently. Maybe worth putting in the article? It is fully realized as, e.g. "That's a whole nother thing." Phil wink (talk) 17:08, 1 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Germans generally translate english "hamburger" as "frikadelle"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frikadelle

In three months in Hamburg I never heard anyone use the word Tartare, nor saw it on any menu. But I ate several Frikadelles — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.197.129.106 (talk) 05:26, 7 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I've read in more than one place that the English word "lute" (the musical instrument) comes from a misreading of Arabic "al oud" (I may have the Arabic slightly wrong), and indeed the Arabic instrument that's just like a lute is called an oud. I would edit the article itself to point this out, but since I'm not absolutely certain, I'll defer to anyone who knows better. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DMR5713 (talk • contribs) 20:12, 3 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I removed this example from a sentence:

"the Magna Carta", in which no article is necessary because magna carta is borrowed rather than calqued (Latin's lack of articles makes the original term either implicitly definite or indeterminate with respect to definiteness [in this context, the former], and the English phrase's proper-noun status renders unnecessary any further determination through the use of an article)

because it's dubious (other loanwords like "the Parthenon" do use the definite article in English) and even if correct requires lengthy justification which distracts from the main point. The remaining example is clearer and I think suffices to illustrate the point. 2620:15C:84:7:B099:B51B:989:8490 (talk) 21:36, 28 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In the section "Creation of productive affixes", it seems as if the Watergate scandal and the plethora of subsequent scandals named "____-gate" (unrelated to the Watergate Hotel) should be listed. Seansinc (talk) 19:08, 3 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I don’t see evidence that “copter” or “heli” are seen as meaning something in themselves. It’s like how “mockumentary” doesn’t prove rebracketing into “doc” and “umentary” Transient Being (talk) 18:35, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You can look at the list of terms prefixed with heli- or suffixed with -copter on Wiktionary – it's happened enough that there's definitely some sort of rebracketing going on, while mockumentary is a pun based on swapping a single phoneme. Anecdotally, I definitely thought the 2 roots of the word were heli and copter until I saw a tumblr post or something about it years ago. I fully didn't connect the ending of helicopter to the same pter as pteranodon, I assume partly due to "copter" being such a common clipping. Coolreader18 (talk) 02:22, 21 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Here's an article that could be put as a source, if you think it's a good one; it specifically says it's due to pter being an uncommon sound in English, thus making it quite liable to be reanalyzed. Coolreader18 (talk) 02:25, 21 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I got arrested for reb racketing 161.82.118.239 (talk) 20:35, 9 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The "Role in forming new words" section repeats many of the same examples with exactly the same phrasing ("an ewt", "a napron", etc.), and the last list is left for the reader to decipher on their own. Some of them are clear, but given that many are explained in full later in the article (e.g. eyas, which the average reader would not be familiar with), would it not make more sense to either leave the final list of examples in the "role in forming new words" section out or somehow add context, maybe even in chart form? 202.17.140.246 (talk) 02:59, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]