At 12:50 PM 12/10/2004, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
Tim Greenwood asked:
> > ... a perfectly normal linguistic process of
> > attributive disambiguation of a term which had grown ambiguous
> > in usage.
>
> Is that like the 'Please RSVP' that I see all too often? Or should
> that not be excused?
*grins* Well, technically, that is not a case of attributive
disambiguation, but rather ignorant redundancy.
On the other hand, for many English speakers, "RSVP" is simply
learned as an unanalyzed verb, pronounced "aressveepee", meaning
"send a response to this message". And to castigate such speakers
for politely prepending a "please" to that verb is a little
too much, don't you think?
Other examples of apparent redundancy, are
Cakes -> Keks (German), plural Kekse
Baby -> bebis (Swedish), plural bebissar
and there are many more such examples.
A./
