Re: "cumulated" or "accumulated"

[Chris Jones]

On Sun, Feb 06, 2011 at 11:18:49PM EST, Jens Petersen wrote:
> Hi,

> I received a downstream bug report [1], suggesting that gettext should
> use the word "accumulated" instead of "cumulated".

> $ cd ~/src/gettext
> $ find . -type f | xargs grep -nH -e " cumulated" | grep -v \.po
> ./gettext-tools/doc/msguniq.texi:15:comments will be cumulated, except that 
> if @samp{--use-first} is
> ./gettext-tools/doc/msguniq.texi:17:will be cumulated.  When using the 
> @samp{--unique} option, duplicates are
> ./gettext-tools/doc/msgcat.texi:15:comments and extract comments will be 
> cumulated, except that if
> ./gettext-tools/src/msguniq.c:336:and extracted comments will be cumulated, 
> except that if --use-first is\n\
> ./gettext-tools/src/msguniq.c:338:will be cumulated.  When using the --unique 
> option, duplicates are discarded.\n\
> ./gettext-tools/src/msgcat.c:378:comments and extract comments will be 
> cumulated, except that if --use-first\n\

> In current English the verb "cumulate" seems little used outside
> Economics, and the word "accumulator" is more common in hardware,
> software, etc.  Is "cumulated" being used intentionally or would you
> accept a patch to change it to "accumulated"?
> 
> Thanks, Jens
> 
> [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=675225

Hmm.. is ‘downstream’ an native speaker of English, or did he/she look
it up in a dictionary..?

Although not very common, I believe that ‘cumulated’ rather than
‘accumulated’ is correct in this instance. 

As with ‘amassed’, the connotation with ‘accumulated’ is of large
quantities of riches, money, gold.. etc. (and also, in a different
context, sediments..), gathered a little at a time over a fairly long
period of time, which does not appear to be relevant to the above
context(s).

The most common meaning of ‘cumulated’ on the other hand is plain
‘collect’.. ‘gather’.. ‘heap together’.. with no reference to how long
the gathering took and how it was done, which would make it a better
candidate in the above circumstances.

In any case, one should also keep in mind that in many dialects of
spoken English there is no phonetic difference beteween ‘accumulated’
and ‘cumulated’ because native speakers more often than not would just
drop (slide over) the unstressed ‘schwa’ at the start of ‘accumulated’.

Just my 2 cents.

cj