2910: pain|staking pains|taking Dec 9, 2024

‘Painstaking’ is an unusual word. In many dictionaries, the pronunciation guides will show that people frequently produce the word as /ˈpeɪnˌsteɪkɪŋ/ where the word breaks up effectively as “pain + staking” which, is not the etymology. That pronunciation isn’t so strange—it is what would be anticipated through the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP)—but what is strange is that in Germanic languages, in nominal compounds, the first element acts like an adjective and shouldn’t be modified. Consider the US WWII-era military strategy of island-hopping (hyphenated for clarity) where obviously the islands would be plural, but this isn’t normally grammatical in English. There are exceptions, as of course with ‘painstaking’, though anyway this is more of a quirk with no singular ‘paintaking’ as such, but then this leads to confusing pronunciation.

1036: Rebracketing Oct 10, 2017

Back-formation has been brought up several times on this blog, but while that follows logical processes that people are accustomed to seeing in words with legitimate, productive suffixes, other words are sometimes broken down into different elements incorrectly without following any linguistic patterns necessarily. 'Rebracketing' for example, is a process in the field of historical linguistics, which concerns itself with the study of how languages evolve, in which a word that derived from a single origin is segmented into a set of different elements. One famous example is that of 'hamburger' which is sometimes falsely taken to be from 'ham' and 'burger' as a sort of compound. It could be that without thinking too much about the actual meats involved in the food the word is seen to follow the pattern of other types of burgers, like "turkey-burger" or "veggie-burger", but those two are also retronyms designed to clarify that something is not a hamburger. Indeed, 'burger' itself is only an abbreviated form of 'hamburger', but rebracketing does not need to follow much logic anyway, and this example would only be considered folk etymology.