Arnold Zwicky’s post “Year names and number names” at the Language Log treats the pronunciation of numbers.
For me, this article is interesting for two reasons:
1) I’ve learned what to call the two different styles (with and without “and”):
a) conjoined reading, like “two thousand and ten”
b) juxtaposed reading, like “two thousand ten”
b) juxtaposed reading, like “two thousand ten”
2) I’ve learned that juxtaposed readings (which I had regarded as wrong so far) are especially popular in the U.S., and Zwicky quotes some proof that he found in 2007 which showed that
“it was, and possibly still is, the practice of (some) American schoolteachers to condemn the conjoined readings as straightforward errors. (This is a matter of schooteacher lore, not enshrined in usage handbooks.) The result is some hostility by American speakers towards the conjoined readings, though they are very frequent (after all, plenty of Americans were not exposed to the schoolroom prohibition, or disregarded it).”
The UK and Australia favour conjoined readings, and Zwicky even found texts that express “some actual hostility to the juxtaposed variants”.
Intriguing, this difference between “some hostility” and “some actual hostility” ;-)
Mr Spock would call it ^^ “Interesting.”
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