Piotr:

>Whoa, ye linguists. En bon fran�ais, "connaissance" ne s'�crit pas >avec un
>"s" seul. In English at large, the spelling "cognizance" is >certainly more
>common than "cognisance" which strikes me as a >characteristically UK (&
>possibly Canadian) spelling (in a simple >test, Google yields 58,900 hits
>for the former and 17,900 for the >latter).

I know this has no bearing on Nostratic but what the hay...

Au contraire, mon ami. I looked the word up in my dictionary
(called "World Book") before posting and it states that it is
"cognizance" that is "especially British". The z-spelling is
listed in plain font under the bolded heading "cognisance" which
tells me that the latter is more common and expected. As a
Canadian, the spelling "cognizance" distresses me. Perhaps this
is due to French influence which prevents me from inserting z's
in English words of French origin without feeling that I've
committed a language crime... but then I think that's what
Quebec's "language police" are there for ;) Arrest me, officer.

As for finding frequencies of spelling preferences in search
engines, I find oscillations with almost every word in every
language. One finds a sturdy number of French sites from
the Yahoo! search engine with both "dictionaire" and
"dictionnaire". All it says is that spelling is the thing of
the past :) Perhaps, the British are just more prone to using
the word "cogni[s/z]ance" in the first place than North
Americans. Canadians don't have cognisance anyways. There are
laws against that sort of thing.

- gLeN




_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com