Dragaera

Ambiguate and other created words (off-topic)

Mark A Mandel mam at theworld.com
Sat Aug 23 12:29:23 PDT 2003

On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Richard Congdon wrote:

#> > 12) Decafalon (n.):
#>
#> Isn't that changing three letters rather than one?
#>
#
#Well, if you stretch it a bit, you could think of the f as being a phi that
#replaced a theta.  It is a greek word, after all. :)

Yeah, but the second alpha's still an insertion. You have to start with
	decathlon
	    ~~~
 Any way you slice it, there's no vowel between the theta and the lambda
in Greek or in written (and many people's spoken) English.

-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and
   Philological Busybody
   a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel