Talk:'til

Usage note

The note about "till" preceding "until" is fascinating. Is there a source for more information about this? Thanks. -207.163.165.37 22:00, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. This requires a reference. --173.18.141.94 05:40, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Adding my voice to that chorus. 12.108.188.134 17:15, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

One reference for till preceding until -- there may be better -- is till¹, Oxford Dictionary of English (3 ed.), Angus Stevenson (editor), online version of 2013, →ISBN. (Rushing right now, else I'd put it in the entry myself.) 4pq1injbok (talk) 22:34, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

It is not possible for a linguistic form to be simultaneously widespread and nonstandard. — This unsigned comment was added by 12.24.60.12 (talk) at 22:58, 14 May 2009 (UTC).

Sure it is. The standard is just one variety of particularly high prestige; not everyone has to speak that variety. 4pq1injbok (talk) 22:35, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Indeed. That's nonsense. Standard is what is accepted in the "standard language", which is mainly that of formal writing. A form can be very common in speech, for example, but not accepted in the standard language. One such example in English would be ain't. — This unsigned comment was added by 93.206.186.165 (talk) at 16:08, 17 April 2014 (UTC).

I don't think it needs a apostrophe in front - til is not a abbreviation of the word until it preceded it and is a word in its own right. — This unsigned comment was added by 82.71.3.174 (talk) at 06:24, 16 June 2014 (UTC).

RFC discussion: March 2011–September 2017

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for cleanup (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.

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'til

Needs context and other templates and removal of tendentious material in usage notes. DCDuring TALK 11:09, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Please take a look. —Ruakh_TALK 13:35, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

By the way, a tag such as {{context|perhaps|_|nonstandard}} (perhaps nonstandard) may be warranted. I don't consider it nonstandard, but obviously some editors do. —Ruakh_TALK 13:55, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

It looks good to me. I just didn't have the courage or acuity today. Should it be "informal" and "poetic"? DCDuring TALK 14:01, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

The funny thing is, that if you ask its users what they mean by it, they (I strongly suspect) won't say that they mean "Alternative spelling of till: until" (which is what the entry currently reads): they'll say they mean "Abbreviation of until.". So, while the former is correct from a where-it-comes-from point of view, the latter is correct from a how-it's-used point of view. We currently relegate the information about abbreviating (deprecated template usage) until to the etymology section. Should we switch to the "Abbreviation of until." definition, relegating information about (deprecated template usage) till to the etymology section, as descriptive? Or, better, put all the etymological information in the etymology section, and define it merely as "until" (with appropriate {{context}} tags)?​—msh210℠ (talk) 15:31, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

I had only focused on the tendentiousness of the usage notes, but the same spirit is in the etymology. I think users would mostly encounter it in poetry. I find it hard to understand the validity of the "true" etymology given. Why would the front apostrope indicate the loss of the second "l"? The supposed false popular etymology has face validity - as all good folk etymologies do - but also fits the convention for use of apostrophes. (deprecated template usage) Til, without apostrophe, might be an abbreviation or alternative spelling of till. DCDuring TALK 16:55, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't totally understand your comment, DCDuring, but as the person who wrote that etymology, let me clarify what I meant: the words till/'til and until are both survivals of much older forms, with the etymon of until being derived from the etymon of till/'til. (In other words: roughly speaking, till/'til is the original form, and until is derived from it.) The spelling 'til results from reanalysis: some people came to view till as a clipped form of until, and some of these people started to respell it accordingly. (This is rather like how the form mike (“microphone”) got respelled as mic, the latter now being the more common spelling. In that case, of course, no reanalysis was necessary, as mike was short for microphone. But the respelling followed the same idea.)
Regarding msh210's point: I think "abbreviation of until" would be wrong, but I would be fine with a definition along the lines of "Till, until".
—Ruakh_TALK 17:32, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Now the scales drop from my eyes. Unbeknownst to me, all my life I've been saying till when I thought I was saying 'til (to whatever modest extent I have ever thought about it at all). Because I don't think I have ever written "till" as either conjunction or preposition. Nor have I written "'til". I actually wouldn't have believed that I had ever even read "till", but the COCA statistics suggest that I must have read "till" nearly one-fifth as often as "until" for the preposition and 3% as often for the conjunction.

What would you suggest for 'till? It gets 108 hits at COCA, vs 738 for 'til. Just a misspelling? DCDuring TALK 22:35, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

I used to spell it 'til thinking that the spelling till was a mistake, confusion with noun. Mglovesfun (talk) 23:12, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

@Mglovesfun: Yeah, I think that's pretty a common belief. Some sort of usage note at [[till]] is likely warranted, though I don't know quite what it should say ("in recent use, sometimes considered an error for 'til"?). —Ruakh_TALK 01:05, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

@DCDuring, re: 'till: I don't know. I only remember ever seeing one instance of it, and I took it to be an error — a sort of "spelling blend" of till and 'til — but I don't know how to judge. I find this hit intriguing: the book mostly has till, and never 'til, but in a few places it has 'till, even sometimes just one line after till. —Ruakh_TALK 01:05, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

It's not terribly common if we consider it a misspelling, especially compared to the number of occurrences of until. It is about 2-3% of till (as prep and conj). But about 100 instances at COCA. DCDuring TALK 02:10, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

@msh210: Having thought about this further, I don't think I agree with your rationale in arguing against "alternative spelling of ____". In general, I doubt that most people ever think of any spelling that they use as an "alternative spelling" of some other spelling for the same word. If we took the view that a spelling is only an "alternative spelling" if its users see it as such, then we could probably just dispense with {{alternative spelling of}} altogether. It would get so little use. I suppose you're distinguishing between users of 'til, who see it as a shortening of until, and users of till, who see it as a word in its own right; but this is a rather tenuous distinction. I'd bet that most users of till do see it as an informal variant of until, but spell it till for the same reason that most people spell perk (“perquisite”) and tummy (“stomach”) and Nick (“Nicholas”) and Mike (“Michael”) and Shelly (“Michelle”) in ways that don't match their associated more-formal variants. —Ruakh_TALK 21:30, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

• Looks good now --WF on Holiday (talk) 16:04, 15 September 2017 (UTC)