"Sturdy numbers"? Let's try Google:

dictionnaire -- 319,000 hits
dictionaire -- 486 hits

The proportion is ca. 656 to one. In other words, the
standard spelling is overwhelmingly more common.

Sorry for taxing other members' patience but this isn't
entirely OT. It is about collecting and handling linguistic
evidence.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...>
To: <nostratic@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 8:20 AM
Subject: [nostratic] cognisance/cognizance


> 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 :)