Ooh ooh, this is a really nifty linguistic concept, and the Wikipedia article is short and succinct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junctural_metanalysis.
One of the strangest ways a language evolves is through the “telephone” effect (if you’ve ever played that game), in which letters get mis-segmented into words due to alternate hearings. For instance, it is said that the word “newt” used to be “ewt,” but people repeatedly saying “an ewt” started saying “a newt” instead. The jumping of n’s as a result of English’s funny (but absolutely necessary -trust me; I tried using only “a” in Cat language, and it was extremely hard to pronounce) indefinite pronoun fix seems to be the most common, although the directionality of the n is not fixed. For instance, the word “orange” used to be “norange,” but the n got pushed into the “a.” Not kidding, seriously! The Persian language still retains the word “narang.”
I think the example at the very bottom of “helicopter” is rather interesting. Here, it is a misdivision of roots, not a misdivision of separate words. I think Wikipedia, in typing only the Greek, makes it more difficult to figure out what the point is, so I’ll briefly explain here: the word “helix” becomes a root in words such as helicobacter (helico (spiral) + bacter (bacterium)). The root of “pter” is seen in Pteradactyl (Ptera (flying) + dactyl (digit, finger)), a type of dinosaur-like flying lizard.
Hence, it is natural that a vehicle that flies by spiralling would be called a HELICO-PTER. But I challenge you to pronounce it that way — Heh’-lee-kou-ptehr”. See? So now it’s Heli-cop-ter and you get things like helipad (landing pad for helicopters).
Ah, is this too much word-nerdiness for you guys? ~_^
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