[Buddha-l] Religious violence, Buddhist violence and spelling

[Alex Wilding]

Accepting as I do that, in language, usage rules, (what else is language but
a mass of interconnecting usages?) but not wanting to go so far down the
road of linguistic relativism as to reach the dead end of "anything goes", I
was interested to look into this.

In my line of work I often use Google's hit-count to get a quick measure of
how common particular word forms are, and I find 379 thousand for the
"regular" spelling and 34 thousand for Nietzschian. Google, of course, finds
mistaken spellings as easily as correct ones, but I submit that a ratio of
about 11:1 raises Nietzschian above the "noise floor" of typos - it is, for
better or worse, a common enough minority usage.

The OED, by the way, does record Nietzschian as a "genuine" alternative
spelling rather than as a mere mistake.

All the best
Alex Wilding

> Op 20-1-2010 22:05, Dan Lusthaus schreef:
> That's the trouble with democracy and the internet, the mob decides. The
> man's name was Nietzsche, not Nietzschi or Nietzschie and he was proud
> of it because it is of  Polish origin.