Talk:beserker
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The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification (permalink).
This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.
I think it's a misspelling of berserker, not an alt form. I tried a search in Google Books but it only seemed to turn up the other spelling. Equinox ◑ 13:12, 17 March 2016 (UTC)
- Agreed, looks like a misspelling. Wouldn't make sense, etymologically, without the r, so it seems unlikely to be a historical variant. P Aculeius (talk) 14:15, 17 March 2016 (UTC)
- Yes, but there are alt-forms that started out as misspellings, and even some main forms (pea, for instance). We need to see if it's made that transition. It would seem to me quite normal for speakers to simplify a cluster like "rs" between vowels, especially since the "ber" has lost its connection to "bear" for most speakers. It may very well be that the drift from berserker to beserker is inevitable, given enough time. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:16, 18 March 2016 (UTC)
- Yes; compare beserk, which constituted one in every fifteen or so uses of the word (beserk,berserk) until around 1985, per Ngrams, and which has made its way into various translation- and other auxiliary- dictionaries (google books:beserk dictionary). "Beserker" itself is around 1/40th as common as "berserker". Lammas: Celebrating Fruits of the First Harvest by Anna Franklin and Paul Mason is one book that uses "beserker(s)" several times and doesn't use "berserker(s)". (In books that use both spellings, it's more likely that the nonstandard spelling is a misspelling, but in books that consistently use one spelling, it's more likely to be an intentional, albeit nonstandard, spelling.) - -sche (discuss) 04:01, 18 March 2016 (UTC)
- Yes, but there are alt-forms that started out as misspellings, and even some main forms (pea, for instance). We need to see if it's made that transition. It would seem to me quite normal for speakers to simplify a cluster like "rs" between vowels, especially since the "ber" has lost its connection to "bear" for most speakers. It may very well be that the drift from berserker to beserker is inevitable, given enough time. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:16, 18 March 2016 (UTC)
- Changed to "misspelling" and kept. As noted above, it's quite common. - -sche (discuss) 07:32, 8 April 2017 (UTC)