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week-end or weekend?
Until recently I'd thought a "weekend" is the only possibility, then I met a "week-end" in one British book.
The Free Dictionary gives both versions, Webster gives only "weekend".
How old is this British book that you read? I'm guessing that it predates the latter half of the 20th century. "Weekend" used to be a hyphenated compound word ("week-end"), but lost its hyphen along the way, much like "to-morrow" and, more recently "e-mail".
However, if you're writing in French, the Academie Francaise dictates that you leave the hyphen in -- "le week-end". ;-)
George : « the Academie Francaise dictates (...) ».
Pas tout à fait : l'Académie *consacre* un *usage* *avéré*. C'est pour cette raison qu'elle suggère <week-end> plutôt que <fin de semaine>.
2George:
The book was a recent one, can't say the name right now. May be I am mistaken here and it was WEEK END - I just remember it wasn't a common WEEKEND.
I notice that although the British now spell weekend as such, they still prnounce it as if it were still week-end, while Americans tend to pronounce it as a homonym of "weakened".
We don't all pronounce it Week-end. Most the people in my area pronounce it softer than that so it sounds a lot like weakened.
I've not heard weekend pronounced as anything other than weekend/week-end/week end.
Usually whether a term is written as two words such as "week end", hyphenated "week-end" or as a compound word "weekend" is purely an orthographic convention and not a matter of pronunciation. English doesn't have such a strong tendency to create such compound words as other West Germanic languages. In Afrikaans the convention is for all the descriptive terms relating to one concept to be combined to form one word unless the resulting word would be excessively long or result in a bizarre or confusing combination of vowels, when it will be hyphenated. This does not generally have an effect on how the word is pronounced. For example in English we usually write street names in the form "Oxford Street" but in Afrikaans it would be "Oxfordstraat". In the past though the English convention seemed to be to hyphenate the word. The street names carved into Georgian buildings in Bath are all hyphenated, eg "Quiet-Street".
Really, Uriel? I wasn't aware of that. I say it the way it's spelt.
weekend - weekend weakened - weekind
What I meant was, they seem to stress the "end" whereas we stress "week". So it ends up sounding like two words instead of one.
It's not important at all; Anyone see "weeken" no matter you write it in "week-end" or something like that.
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