This word has devolved. It was rightfully spelled as “preëmpt” so pronounciation follows from the spelling and vice versa. Then some people who dislike diacritics took a lazy approach and swapped in another regular “e”: preempt, which sounds out incorrectly and becomes more of a disaster when writing past tense preempted.
If we cannot tolerate diacritics, then “pre-empt” seems sensible. Apparently the Cambridge dictionary is okay with that, but that shitty ad-pushing dictionary website is hostile to defensive browsers.
It would be interesting to know which spelling of the word translates better into other languages, which would be a measure of commonality in the various language models datasets. I don’t suppose there is a web service that tests that?
1 Comments
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe · 1 pts · 20h
I don't see the disaster for past tense. Though I agree hyphenating makes more sense - I've seen and used that spelling.
Remember that spelling often reflects how something was pronounced at the time - not today. Pronunciation has changed over the years, but we retained the spelling.
Spelling isn't really useful metric for translating, as meaning is the challenge. Different languages use different memes for meaning: some use individual words for the same concept, others use phrases, and still others don't even have the same concept so translating becomes a challenge to approximate the meaning.