Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Jamshid Ibrahim  I do agree Alain:
1. Diachronic track is the right one
2. The place of a word in a sentence
We only need to find out. |
I'm afraid the diachronic track, as often, is the key but is a very complex key (so complex that it makes the key impractical to use). Some of the pairs have no distinguishable difference, as is the case with
geographic / geographical. But some of the pairs are distinct: a
historical record (one of the many records that have to do with history) isn't the same as a
historic record such as the
Magna Carta - a record that has particular significance in the context of history (or even the sort of
historic record achieved by Sergei Bubka - although as he is now retired maybe it could be called 'historical'!). Still other 'pairs' have one half missing - someone has already mentioned
public (which causes problems when people use the adverb:
Quote:
The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993.
publicly, publically (advs.)
Publicly is the usual spelling; publically does occur, but rarely in Edited English.
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Google, for all its limitations, confirms this:
Quote:
Results 1 - 10 of about 2,550,000 for publically. (0.31 seconds)
Did you mean: publicly
...
Results 1 - 10 of about 81,700,000 for publicly
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In another thread someone - it may have been Bianca ? - quoted David Crystal about final
Es. It seems to me quite possible that typesetters had a similarly cavalier attitude to -ic/-ical - they just stuck in an extra syllable if they wanted to pad out a line of type. And this applied not only to -ic/ical;
physic (an archaic word referring to various aspects of medicine, which unlike 'public' has only the -
ical form in current English) was sometimes spelt with -
ic, sometimes -
ick, and sometimes -
icke.
(I didn't join this thread earlier, since the issue has been discussed before and I didn't feel I had much to add. For the language learner, the situation is unavoidably unclear: there are four possibilities - a pair with the same meaning, a pair with distinct meanings, a 'pair' with only an -
ic form, and a 'pair' with only an -
ical form. There is no way of predicting which ones were 'chosen' by usage. And sometimes, even when there is a distinction, a quotation uses the 'wrong' form - simply because at the time of the quotation there was no such distinction.)
b