Monday, November 22, 2010

unaxseptable

kottke rants against Google's biased calculator (because it provides an answer rather than search results) then finishes with this:

Google! This. Is. Un. Acce. Ptable!

Huh? Does kottke have dyslexia*? I get the staccato pronunciation he's representing, but that's not at all how I would say it. I would say (and write): Un. Ac. Cept. Able! Even if you want to pose your own variation, can we agree that kottke's is simply not a viable analysis of the syllable structure of the word? The double "c" spelling makes it a bit odd looking, but it actually helps in the analysis. Each "c" represents a different sound, and each sound should go in a different syllable. And how does he start the final syllable with "pt"! That is unaxseptable!


*Dyslexics can have difficulty counting syllables.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Maybe he doesn't pronounce the p, and it's by analogy with pterodactyl vel sim.?

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Chris said...

Possible, I guess. I can see not pronouncing the "p" in rapid speech, basically as an error, but I'd be surprised if that was part of his phonological representation. Wouldn't be the first time I was surprised, hehe.

TomV said...

"ptable", pt as in "ptui"--He's so mad he could spit?

Jason M. Adams said...

I think it's satire.. :)

Chris said...

@Jason, the post certainly was tongue-in-cheek, but do you think his syllabic analysis was also?

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