Talk:fortnite

Full quote should be as followed. Can't do it as am n00b

1. • 1771, Tobias George Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker:

     We are all together in the same house, and all parties have agreed to the match, and in a fortnite the surrymony will be performed.

RFV discussion: October 2022–February 2023

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fortnite

This could be solved in five minutes. Does someone have OED access, or really any other resource that could quickly confirm if this is a valid alternate spelling?

The sole citation we have right now is within a character's quoted letter, and is one of a great many misspellings this character and others in that book have, such as surrymony two words later. As the author of the book almost certainly did not think the word fortnite was actually spelled as such, I don't think it counts as a valid sighting of the word. I said much the same with #paleass above, which I think was not just a deliberate misspelling but also a deliberately vulgar one.

However, I think it's certainly possible for fortnite to be alive as a valid alternate spelling independently of the Humphry Clinker book. Due to the overwhelming popularity of the video game, a normal Google search would be useless. Using Google Books to search for 20th-century cites only, I've turned up a lot of uses in scientific journals, but they're almost all capitalized, like the names of scientific projects often are. It seems to have been a brand name at one point, as was Fortniter. It took me until the bottom of the fourth page to find a single lowercase usage, which could either be

A misspelling. Even the best scientists make mistakes.

An abbreviation (like how meteorologists use trof for trough, even these days when most people have plenty of screen space).

A usage of one of the proper noun senses, lowercased for one reason or another (although it looks like a common noun usage in this context to me).

An alternate valid spelling of the word, made unusually difficult to find because of the reasons I've spelled out above.

Nearly all of the senses I've found seem to be related to science, particularly tree and soil science. It's possible this is a gap in Google Books' coverage, and I don't think I can find three cites there. But nite clearly exists, so maybe fortnite does too.

Thanks,

—Soap— 18:47, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

No, the OED doesn’t list this as a variant of fortnight. — Sgconlaw (talk) 19:26, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Seemingly eye dialect: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7] (meaning unclear), [8], [9], [10], [11] (?), [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23]. Not eye dialect: [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30], [31]. 98.170.164.88 23:48, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

The context of these cites demonstrates pretty clearly that this is, at best, a misspelling. If we were to keep all of the misspellings represented in these cites we could probably double the entry count without adding any more actual words. - TheDaveRoss 13:45, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Did you see the second part of the list though? I don't think we can confidently call it a misspelling given it was used multiple times in the 1600s, before orthography was as stable as today. 98.170.164.88 14:37, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

See midnite, overnite, all-nite, to-nite, tonite, 2nite. DCDuring (talk) 15:01, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Yes, those were the main ones I was referring to, since the eye-dialect stuff is always chaos. In the latter cites many of the surrounding words are also misspelled, and not in ways which indicate that they were alternate accepted spellings, but more along the lines of someone sounding out words they weren't sure how to spell. - TheDaveRoss 15:14, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

How does one learn to detect such a state of mind in an author? DCDuring (talk) 15:57, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

U can ditect a unbility too spel by reedin wats rit. - TheDaveRoss 19:33, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I'd personally be inclined to keep this based on how many early citations of genuine use there are from the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s. And if "we were to keep all of the misspellings represented in these cites [and thus] double the entry count" I wouldn't necessarily see that as a bad thing, assuming the spellings were actually well-attested in sources from the 1600s and 1700s. This could be useful to readers because they might be reading an old work, come across a weirdly spelled word, and wonder what it means.

We have many entries that have less validity than this one does. Whether the template is {{obsolete spelling of}} or {{misspelling of}} doesn't matter as much to me; there should probably be a second sense for {{eye dialect of}} too. Btw, a couple of the works seem to use pretty normal spelling for the most part (the Maine Historical Society and Evening Argus ones). But those are also later, both being from the 1800s, which makes sense since spelling was more standardized by then. 98.170.164.88 19:51, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

That would be eye dialect, IMHO. How can you detect "someone sounding out words they weren't sure how to spell"? DCDuring (talk) 20:56, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I've always felt that the term eye dialect was meant to refer to only one thing: quoted speech within written works where a person who has poor education is assigned dialog with misspelled words in order to show they cannot spell. If we're reading a real person's own writing, by definition it can't be an eye dialect because no outside author is putting the words down for them. —Soap— 23:50, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

An entire work could be written in that manner. DCDuring (talk) 00:25, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

It would be good if we had a section on pronunciation spelling at Appendix:Glossary, like we do for eye dialect, as it’s not currently clear to me what the difference is meant to be. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 00:32, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Well, this is one of my bugbears, I guess, because to me the difference between pronunciation spelling and eye dialect is plain as day .... eye dialect is used in writing to show how a character would spell words if they were writing them down, even though their pronunciation may be flawless. Pronunciation spelling is essentially the opposite .... the character's spelling skills are irrelevant; it's their pronunciation that's nonstandard. I don't want to distract from the discussion about fortnite, but I suspect this is going to come up again, so I would also like to get these labels into the glossary, hard and fast, with meanings we can come to agree on. —Soap— 01:04, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Editing to note that I decided to add a label for pronunciation spelling at the Glossary as we both wanted one, and that I changed the label for eye dialect. If people object to what I did, hopefully we can discuss it on the Glossary talk page or somewhere like the Beer Parlour. —Soap— 01:16, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

A welcome move. I’ve now redefined an entry I created, yur, as a pronunciation spelling. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 11:35, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

In what world is "U" either eye dialect or pronunciation spelling? Doesn't matter. If you look at, for instance, the cite currently labeled 245 it has the following text:

Sir, by theas you are informd of my a Riwall hear the 24 of January note the Couts [cost?] I came to a very bad market for fish is over plenty and was sold be foor I came in for 11/3 pr hogshead the Small pox is very Cruel hear and I do Expect it Daly though we are all wale in health as yet and I Shun it as much as posiboll I have Soold our Cargo all to one man Mr Minot and he has gon to Get me a Cargo of molasses in Radines [readiness?] and I shall Go Round to the north Side to Load in a fortnites time att furtest if we continue our helths and I hope to Sail att furtest by the 20 of march for boston: I am o bludg to hier [obliged to hire?] all your Casks...

This is a letter from one person to another, so eye dialect and pronunciation spelling are not reasonable interpretations. The incorrect choice of homophones (hear), the simple misspellings (hier, gon, posiboll), the generally poor grammar, and everything about this screams that the person writing was not a highly proficient writer of the English language. I am not sure what the benefit of keeping terms which a number of people who were not competent writers or speakers have used, we could also find a lot of misspellings on the walls of a kindergarten classroom, but I don't think it is a sensible thing for us to document them. - TheDaveRoss 12:53, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

You've quoted the document that I would say has the spelling least consistent with contemporary norms. On the other hand, consider this record from Salem, Massachusetts:

Salem ye 30^th Novembr. 1664. Phylip Cromwell Aged aboute fifty years testifyeth that Aboute a fortnite since, beinge at Mr Prices house, there was John Pickrin, ye saide Price speakinge to ye said Pickringe, aboute the turning ye wheelbarers into ye River, ye saide Pickringe made answer this was before the Agreement or writinge was made betwixt ye saide Price & Company and further this Deponent sayeth not.

I maintain that this is representative of Early Modern English. Sure, the text uses ye instead of the (which should really be þ^e), puts -e at the end of words where we wouldn't today, and the capitalization is all over the place. But all of those traits are common in texts of the era. The 1611 KJV uses þ^e, e.g. see [32]. If you want examples within the same genre, see this record from the city of Oxford, hardly known for being an illiterate part of England, which has a similar style down to the exact phrase "ye saide". The only real peculiarity is "wheelbarers", which I suppose is supposed to mean "wheelbarrows", but if that's enough to dismiss the text as illiterate then I guess you'd have to throw out almost all texts from the era. (For example, Shakespeare's first folio is full of idiosyncratic spellings like "out paromord" where we would today write "out-paramoured", not to mention all the extra e's at the ends of words, etc.) 98.170.164.88 17:49, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Btw, here are more early uses I missed previously: letter reprinted in a report of the House of Lords, c. 1603. Records of Westmoreland (i.e., Wyoming Valley, PA), 1772. Doncaster, England, c. 1614. North Carolina, 1698. Virginia Company of London, 1607–1626 (unfortunately preview only so I can't narrow down the date). Chipping Campden, England, can't see the date due to preview mode. Topsfield, Massachusetts, 1682. Letter, New York, 1783. How many citations do we need to gather to convince the naysayers? I suspect there are more. 98.170.164.88 18:23, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

I think this is clearly a real obsolete / now-nonstandard spelling. We might dismiss the letter full of misspellings like o bludg, but there are plenty of other cites, as the IP has amply shown. It's in line with spellings like nite for night that go back to Middle English. Whether to have a separate sense for the modern nonstandard use a la lite for light (which is practically a standard spelling in many contexts/senses), and how to label it, I don't know; maybe {{lb|en|obsolete|or|now|nonstandard}} {{alternative spelling of|en|fortnight}} covers it... - -sche (discuss) 18:55, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

RFV Passed, the citations are clearly valid. Ioaxxere (talk) 02:53, 14 February 2023 (UTC)