Timeline for Should I use 'leitmotifs', the plural of leitmotif, in academic English?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 22, 2016 at 4:53 | comment | added | herisson | ...(and this describes motiv as having underlying but devoiced /v/ ) and brave apparently has /v/ (although brav has /f/ of course). | |
| Jan 22, 2016 at 4:49 | comment | added | herisson | @PeterShor: There isn't intervocalic voicing in general for German fricatives. The letter "v" can represent /v/ in some words, and /f/ in others. At the end of a word, it always represents /f/, since /v/ is not possible there. When it comes before a native German grammatical ending, there doesn't seem to be any main tendency: nerven prescriptively has /f/, the speakers here have /v/ in motive... | |
| Jan 22, 2016 at 4:24 | history | edited | user140086 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 22, 2016 at 0:44 | comment | added | Peter Shor | Actually, I was wrong ... Leitmotive is pronounced with an /f/ sound. I must not understand the rules for when German fricatives get voiced. | |
| Jan 21, 2016 at 23:49 | comment | added | Sven Yargs | @PeterShor: I don't know why MW doesn't list leitmotive as a variant plural of leitmotiv. The Ngram graph and Google Books results for leitmotiv/leitmotive/leitmotivs for 1900–2008 show considerable support in English for leitmotive as a plural, though some matches involve German texts or use leitmotive as a singular variant of leitmotif. | |
| Jan 21, 2016 at 23:02 | comment | added | hansonhill | Thanks for the comments. I decided to use 'recurring themes' instead. Leitmotifs should have confused me right away, as I actually am German :) | |
| Jan 21, 2016 at 22:53 | comment | added | Peter Shor | Don't use leitmotivs. It looks strange to me, and nobody will know how to pronounce it (leitmotiv spelled with a "v" should still end with an /f/ sound). Also, it might confuse people who know German, where the plural of Leitmotiv (with an /f/ sound) is Leitmotive (with a /v/ sound). But leitmotif is the anglicized form, and the English plural leitmotifs works fine. | |
| Jan 21, 2016 at 21:22 | vote | accept | hansonhill | ||
| Jan 21, 2016 at 21:08 | answer | added | Tim Ward | timeline score: 4 | |
| Jan 21, 2016 at 20:25 | comment | added | Hot Licks | "Leitmotifs" is only one letter more pretentious than "leitmotif". | |
| Jan 21, 2016 at 20:24 | comment | added | Sven Yargs | Merriam-Webster gives two forms for the word in question: leitmotif (the more common) and leitmotiv (the less). By neither identifying the term as a collective noun nor including plural forms in the entry, MW signals that the plural spellings are leitmotifs and leitmotivs. It seems to me that the plural leitmotifs is appropriate in any literary setting where the singular leitmotif would be. | |
| Jan 21, 2016 at 20:22 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | Dictionaries don't normally list regular plurals unless there's there's some significant usage difference other than that implied by "more than one". So it's not that only some dictionaries "seem to know" the plural - it's just that most see no reason to list a perfectly ordinary plural form that has no special extra meaning that doesn't naturally follow from the singular as defined. If you like the word leitmotif and you're confident your readers will understand what you mean, there's no reason to avoid it just because your context requires a plural form (but it's "arty", not scientific). | |
| Jan 21, 2016 at 20:02 | review | First posts | |||
| Jan 21, 2016 at 20:27 | |||||
| Jan 21, 2016 at 20:00 | history | asked | hansonhill | CC BY-SA 3.0 |