04-06-2026, 07:09 PM
Feller's explanation does make sense when looking at the linguistic mechanisms in isolation. What he describes is called hypercorrection, which often happens when speakers of a less prestigious dialect try to adapt to a norm they don't fully master. Something like octembre is exactly what hypercorrection does: imagining that rules in the target language apply more broadly than they actually do. So the speaker might think subconsciously "I say octobre, but that's probably wrong because all the other months are with embre, so octembre must be the correct form". This is a nice and clean example of hypercorrection, leading to novel words through the unnecessary application of rules.
That said, I don't know if this is actually the correct explanation. It's linguistically sound, but it might just as well be as you say: that octembre was simply the pronunciation in certain dialects. I think this would really only work if this dialect pronounces "o" rather nasally, even without a nasal consonant around.
Anything else would be hypercorrection because of the "-embre" sequence.
Those newspapers are interesting in their timing. Since the form is still rare (given the vast corpus available) and I don't see any indications that they are writing in a dialect, I think the only possible explanation is that the typesetter occasionally made this mistake.
Generally, I do feel like the endings of French septembre - octobre sound more alike than the same pair in any other language I'm familiar with.
How are you finding these, by the way? Does BNF have OCR for its manuscripts as well?
That said, I don't know if this is actually the correct explanation. It's linguistically sound, but it might just as well be as you say: that octembre was simply the pronunciation in certain dialects. I think this would really only work if this dialect pronounces "o" rather nasally, even without a nasal consonant around.
Anything else would be hypercorrection because of the "-embre" sequence.
Those newspapers are interesting in their timing. Since the form is still rare (given the vast corpus available) and I don't see any indications that they are writing in a dialect, I think the only possible explanation is that the typesetter occasionally made this mistake.
Generally, I do feel like the endings of French septembre - octobre sound more alike than the same pair in any other language I'm familiar with.
How are you finding these, by the way? Does BNF have OCR for its manuscripts as well?