3 ms·

Yes, because there's more of them than you, by many orders of magnitude.

umanwizard 7y ago
More of who than me? Google engineers? It's unclear what you mean. Anyway, if we're going by number of people, I posted above a link to a blog post by people who did corpus research and found that the spelling "miniscule" makes up 52% of uses of the word. And, obviously, any normal dictionary will contain it, even if Google's doesn't. (Dictionaries typically are in the business of documenting uses of language, not declaring them right or wrong). Any one you care to check will contain "miniscule", note that it is a widely-used variant of "minuscule", and probably mention that some people consider it "wrong", which of course is not to say that it is wrong. ------------ Edit: I don't think I am getting my point across very clearly, so I will restate it here. I am bothered by people policing language for three main reasons: (1) It is logically meaningless. Language is a cultural phenomenon, not a formalized set of rules from some authority. It is absolutely impossible to define what it means for a given use of language to be "correct" or "incorrect" beyond "what is used and understood by the community of language users". Claiming that a widely-used spelling variant is "wrong" makes no more sense than claiming that rock music is "wrong" because it diverges from blues and whatever else came before. Or saying that Japanese people celebrate Christmas "wrong" because it diverges from how Catholics celebrate it (which in turn diverges from how pre-Christian populations celebrated various solstice festivals). (2) It neuters the study of language, which is an extremely rich and interesting field. It'd be much more interesting to ask why the variant arose, from a scientific perspective. The best theory is that it is a combination of two factors: confusion with the word "miniature", and sound changes in English that have cause unstressed vowels to be pronounced indistinguishably (i.e., unless you are trying very hard to enunciate, there is no perceptible difference between an unstressed "i" sound and an unstressed "u" sound). Now we're getting into questions of etymology, phonology, psycho-linguistic issues like "what information about words in our lexicon do we carry in our brain", etc., all absolutely fascinating topics in their own right. Just saying "miniscule is wrong" obscures all of this. By the way, the case of "miniscule" is by no means unusual. There are absolutely loads of words that changed for reasons with no etymological justification. One example is island -- the "s" has no etymological justification, at all, and the current spelling gradually became more common than the earlier "iland" (and various other variants) between 1500 and 1700 by analogy with the probably unrelated Latin word insula. Words changing because of phonological perception effects is very common too: apron comes from an earlier "napron", because of "a napron" getting re-analyzed as "an apron". For those of us who are interested in the sorts of things that happened to apron and island centuries ago, it's cool to witness a similar phenomenon in progress today. (3) Language policing is very closely connected with classism and, in some countries (including the US), racism. I'm not accusing anyone in this thread of that, but it's a good reason to be sensitive about it.
- diminoten 7y ago
  Sources. There are more sources. I have to be honest, I didn't read most of your comment, because there's literally nothing you can say to change the immutable fact that language is defined by its population, and you, as an individual, have very little say in that (and for good reason). It's "minuscule". That's it.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    You might want to try actually reading my comment, rather than assuming you know what it says and arguing against a strawman. I certainly don't disagree that "language is defined by its population".
    - diminoten 7y ago
      Okay I did, and I was right; you're wasting my time, possibly on purpose.

More of who than me? Google engineers? It's unclear what you mean. Anyway, if we're going by number of people, I posted above a link to a blog post by people who did corpus research and found that the spelling "miniscule" makes up 52% of uses of the word. And, obviously, any normal dictionary will contain it, even if Google's doesn't. (Dictionaries typically are in the business of documenting uses of language, not declaring them right or wrong). Any one you care to check will contain "miniscule", note that it is a widely-used variant of "minuscule", and probably mention that some people consider it "wrong", which of course is not to say that it is wrong. ------------ Edit: I don't think I am getting my point across very clearly, so I will restate it here. I am bothered by people policing language for three main reasons: (1) It is logically meaningless. Language is a cultural phenomenon, not a formalized set of rules from some authority. It is absolutely impossible to define what it means for a given use of language to be "correct" or "incorrect" beyond "what is used and understood by the community of language users". Claiming that a widely-used spelling variant is "wrong" makes no more sense than claiming that rock music is "wrong" because it diverges from blues and whatever else came before. Or saying that Japanese people celebrate Christmas "wrong" because it diverges from how Catholics celebrate it (which in turn diverges from how pre-Christian populations celebrated various solstice festivals). (2) It neuters the study of language, which is an extremely rich and interesting field. It'd be much more interesting to ask why the variant arose, from a scientific perspective. The best theory is that it is a combination of two factors: confusion with the word "miniature", and sound changes in English that have cause unstressed vowels to be pronounced indistinguishably (i.e., unless you are trying very hard to enunciate, there is no perceptible difference between an unstressed "i" sound and an unstressed "u" sound). Now we're getting into questions of etymology, phonology, psycho-linguistic issues like "what information about words in our lexicon do we carry in our brain", etc., all absolutely fascinating topics in their own right. Just saying "miniscule is wrong" obscures all of this. By the way, the case of "miniscule" is by no means unusual. There are absolutely loads of words that changed for reasons with no etymological justification. One example is island -- the "s" has no etymological justification, at all, and the current spelling gradually became more common than the earlier "iland" (and various other variants) between 1500 and 1700 by analogy with the probably unrelated Latin word insula. Words changing because of phonological perception effects is very common too: apron comes from an earlier "napron", because of "a napron" getting re-analyzed as "an apron". For those of us who are interested in the sorts of things that happened to apron and island centuries ago, it's cool to witness a similar phenomenon in progress today. (3) Language policing is very closely connected with classism and, in some countries (including the US), racism. I'm not accusing anyone in this thread of that, but it's a good reason to be sensitive about it.

diminoten 7y ago
Sources. There are more sources. I have to be honest, I didn't read most of your comment, because there's literally nothing you can say to change the immutable fact that language is defined by its population, and you, as an individual, have very little say in that (and for good reason). It's "minuscule". That's it.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  You might want to try actually reading my comment, rather than assuming you know what it says and arguing against a strawman. I certainly don't disagree that "language is defined by its population".
  - diminoten 7y ago
    Okay I did, and I was right; you're wasting my time, possibly on purpose.