![]() ![]() ![]() Surprisingly (to me) 15% of the surveyed panel of experts preferred the /iz/ form. The American Heritage Dictionary, whose Usage Panel has compiled a body of reliable, linguistically-informed annotation on many unusual situations, has an extensive note on the pluralization of process. It is listed as an option only in a few dictionaries, particularly highly descriptivist and non-traditionalistic ones like the Merriam-Webster Online. This irregular pluralization is not used for any other nouns beginning with pro- or ending with -cess. While the plural of process is always spelled processes, about 25% of you, regardless of how you pronounce the first vowel, pronounce this word with the plural form /iz/ "EEZ". Irregular Pluralization: A Case of Homophony-Avoidance I think we're just seeing some random variation that plays out differently in different dialects.ī. It's possible, of course, that these latter words formerly exhibited variation that has now been lost, or that some other words are beginning to show variation in the first-syllable vowel. All three have verb forms, but so, for instance, does program. All three are of late Middle English origin (14th / early 15th century), and all borrowed from medieval Latin or Old French or both: but so, for instance, are the invariant product and proverb. There's no simple explanation for why there should be variability at all in these three words, or why it should be specifically these three and not others. While nearly one-half of you say PRO-sess, and well over one-third say PRO-gress, PRO-ject is far less common, even among British English speakers. But the three words that vary don't do so consistently among individual speakers, as the poll results show:įor each word, I took the percentage of people who always say /pro/ and added one-half of the percentage of those who sometimes say /pro/ to get a rough estimate of the frequency of each variant. Of course, not all two-syllable "pro-" nouns exhibit such variation: profile, pronoun, and program fall strictly towards /o/, while proverb and product are, as far as I know, always pronounced with /ɔ/ or /ɑ/. ![]() The other two common ones are project and progress, the subject of the mid-week poll. Process is one of a set of two-syllable nouns, stressed on the first syllable, that exhibit such variation. In particular, Canadians tend to use both PRO- and PRAH-, which is unsurprising given our usual intermediate linguistic state between American and British. There is also quite a bit of overlap - over 25% of you said that you use both forms, including speakers of all the major regional dialects. Almost all of the respondents who selected PRAH-sess (which can be /prɑsɛs/ or /prɔsɛs/ depending on your dialect) are American, while almost all of those who selected PRO-sess (/prosɛs/) are speakers of non-American dialects (Canadian, British, Australian, etc.). Process is one of those words that exhibits very strong dialectal variability. The best way to treat the analysis is with two separate essays. Secondly, remember how I said at the beginning of the poll post that I hoped this one would be short and simple? I should have known better the moment I chose a poll word like process for which there are two completely separate pronunciation issues. Your responses to the poll on process brought us up to nearly 150 answers, a much larger sample than usual. Firstly, welcome to all the first-time respondents who have come here via grammargasm, alphabet_soup, and unusual_words. ![]()
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