In a slight twist to our discussion of orthographic gemination, I found myself mis-spelling "emporer" and turned to Google for consolation. I observed the same telltale distribution:
emperer 1,950 |
emporer 89,100 |
emperor 4,050,000 |
emporor 6,680 |
Apparently writers know the word contains an "e" and an "o" but sometimes forget which order they go in, perhaps because both are pronounced as the schwa vowel. I searched a pronunciation dictionary for words containing adjacent schwa vowels corresponding to different orthographic vowels (e.g. bachelor, developer) but could not replicate the above pattern.
Posted by Steven Bird at April 1, 2004 05:18 AM