Paronymic attraction is popular or
folk etymology
Folk etymology – also known as (generative) popular etymology, analogical reformation, (morphological) reanalysis and etymological reinterpretation – is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a mo ...
arising from similarity of appearance or sound.
It is the distorting effect exerted on a word by one of its
paronym
Paronyms are near-homophones ("soundalike"), near-homographs ("lookalike") and/or near-cognates ("meanalike") — words that are similar but not identical in pronunciation, spelling, and/or lexical meaning — which may cause confusion in thei ...
s (that is, a quasi-
homonym
In linguistics, homonyms are words which are either; '' homographs''—words that mean different things, but have the same spelling (regardless of pronunciation), or '' homophones''—words that mean different things, but have the same pronunciat ...
) according to
etymology
Etymology ( ) is the study of the origin and evolution of words—including their constituent units of sound and meaning—across time. In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. ...
and
onomastics
Onomastics (or onomatology in older texts) is the study of proper names, including their etymology, history, and use.
An ''alethonym'' ('true name') or an ''orthonym'' ('real name') is the proper name of the object in question, the object of onom ...
. Paronymic attraction is the origin of many names. There are even cross-linguistic instances of such attractions. For example, the resemblance between the
Romanian
Romanian may refer to:
*anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania
**Romanians, an ethnic group
**Romanian language, a Romance language
***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language
**Romanian cuisine, traditional ...
word ''locaţie'' (space for which rent should be paid) and the English word ''location'' helped a
semantic shift
Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift) is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from t ...
of the former word to include the latter sense.
Paronymic attraction is commonly expressed through the replacement of a word whose meaning is not understood. For example, in the
French language
French ( or ) is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European family. Like all other Romance languages, it descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. French evolved from Northern Old Gallo-R ...
, ''interpoler'' (to add something in the middle of writing) and ''interpeller'' (to question someone formally) are sometimes substituted for each other because of their similar sound, despite their differences in meaning.
References
{{reflist
See also
*
Barbarism (linguistics)
A barbarism is a nonstandard word, expression or pronunciation in a language, particularly one regarded as an error in morphology, while a ''solecism'' is an error in syntax. The label was originally applied to mixing Ancient Greek or Latin with o ...
*
Lemma (morphology)
In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (: lemmas or lemmata) is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, ''break'', ''breaks'', ''broke'', ''broken'' and ''breaking'' are forms of th ...
*
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, wh ...
*
False etymology
A false etymology (fake etymology or pseudo-etymology) is a false theory about the origin or derivation of a specific word or phrase. When a false etymology becomes a popular belief in a cultural/linguistic community, it is a folk etymology (or po ...
Linguistic morphology
Semantic relations