Plaese elxpain why spelilng mtaters wenh yuo can read thsi
Nothing matters any more, and I’m not a teacher.
I’m not a teacher but I will have a go. Often being able to spell and being able to understand the difference between one spelling and another can make an important difference to your comprehension of, for example
Ladder operating instructions
Squirrel trap safety warnings
etc
etc
😀
Spelling matters, if only to ensure the message is clearly understood.
If spelling doesn't matter - and I accept language evolves and changes - then what else won't matter in a few years time? (Slightly rhetorical, devil's advocate question)
(Slightly rhetorical, devil’s advocate question)
As opposed to DeVille’s Advocaat which is something else entirely
You've got all the right letters, just not necessarily in the right order. Crucially, the first and last are in the right place. The fact it can be read suggests that the human brain is very good at interpreting information quickly, and in fact spelling does matter.
Can read the OP.
Can't read my myopic mate's whatsapps.
English spelling is a minefield. I teach it to kids whose first language is a piece of piss to spell (written as it's spoken) and it just wrecks their heads.
Why is spelling and grammar important?
Well... It's the difference between "helping my Uncle Jack off his horse" and "helping my Uncle jack-off his horse."
I know which one I would rather do.
Teacher here... and yes, I have used that one in a classroom environment. My Year 11's LOVED it!
When it comes to pronunciation and diction... Imagine this conversation in a Bakery...
Customer: "Can I have free pasties, please?"
Shop Assistant: "No Sir, you have to pay for them."
Customer: "No, I don't want free pasties, I want FREE pasties, you know... one, two, FREE."
Whether we like it or not, good spelling, grammar, diction and pronunciation act like a passport to a better life. These core skills help us to communicate in an accurate and effective way. In an interview situation they signal our level of education, ability to do an effective job and whether or not you would be a good Company representative.
A wide ranging vocabulary (including colloquialisms) makes individuals far more interesting people and a far more inclusive Country 'ta boot but sometimes you have to know "when to play the game" and speak "proppa'like!"
Don't agree? Well, next time you are sitting round the Christmas Dinner table, in front of Great Aunty Dorothy..... just chuck in a few Eff's and Jeff's - ya know from the building site at work.... I'm sure she won't mind.
There are a small number of words where the spelling changes the meaning, everything else is just a pointless waste of time. Unfortunately our 1950s government saw it as important, so KS2 is made tediously boring by having to learn by rote.
Much more important is to learn and use a wide vocabulary. Often the words on my kids' spelling lists haven't even been explained in class.
In my subject (Chemistry) the spelling only matters if it changes the meaning of the word (alkene/alkane). The rest of the time, as long as I can tell what you're on about then it's fine. Regularly give full credit for answers involving 'newtrons' and 'allectrons'.
Just realised the final letters in the OP aren't all correct. So lnog as teh fsrit oen is rghti toghuh tenh yuo'er OK I gsesu. Bto if seno of tuh letzesr arr wugno tfen yoa'rr ****t.
Plaese elxpain why spelilng mtaters wenh yuo can read thsi
All the words in that sentence are simple and widely understood so it's easily interpreted despite the spelling. It wouldn't work as well with more obscure vocab as it would be less easy to interpret and it would be difficult to look up any words you didn't know.
As others have said spelling mistakes tend to be more diverse than slightly rearranging letters and so not always easily worked out.
Also, a dyslexia specialist once told me that the general shape of words is very important in recognition and the shape of those words is largely maintained with the first and last letters mostly being unaltered.
It's the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse, and helping your uncle jack off a horse.
...and that’s why my Uncle Nosh gave up show jumping to become an English teacher.
All languages have a large amount of redundancy as regards letters in words, when those words are given context by being placed in text with meaning and using widely understood syntax. Chomsky is worth reading if you want to understand how this works, and how to measure it. Get ready to learn lambda calculus if you want to quantify how much spelling matters (or not) in whatever form of English you use, for a known audience.
Read the book Cougar has linked to instead actually, far more entertaining.
Plaese elxpain why spelilng mtaters wenh yuo can read thsi
Just because it's "readable" doesn't mean it's comfortable to read. It's understandable but it's painful. Would you want to read a book written like that?
As someone argued on a food thread a few days ago, you can survive off a diet of meat & veg stew a la Scouse / Hot-Pot. So why would you bother cooking lobster thermidore with a raspberry coulis?
You can live in a house with bare bricks so why bother plastering and decorating? An old sack cloth will keep you warm and cover up your naughty bits, why do we bother with a suit for work?
The Western world of which we are a part has reached a degree of sophistication. Your sentence in your OP might be functional at a very basic level but it's, well, shit. Unless of course your point was "hey, this is readable, isn't that amazing!" is which case yes it is, it's quite remarkable, but what you need there then is a Facebook account because it's been doing the rounds as a meme for years.
I'm poor at spelling and grammar and dislike pedantry on the subject. I find it amusing that it's a rare reply on this forum about 'correct' use of English that doesn't itself have errors - for example the incorrectly capitalized common nouns (especially 'Uncle') in a reply above.
"Capitalized?"
Bloody Yank.
I have still not heard a convincing answer with the possible exception of the Chemistry teacher.
My view is that much like the drive on the left or drive on the right discussion for cars, it really doesn't matter as long as everyone can get along.
Beyond that it is for pedants and those who like to prove intellectual superiority, plus obviously those for whom rules matter more than reason.
My mum is an English teacher, my aunt a language teacher and my uncle a head master. As a kid I used to love to ask this question at Christmas and then retire to bed. It was like the olden days version of arguing with the internet.
Capitalized?”
Bloody Yank.
Nope, that's the correct english spelling.
I have still not heard a convincing answer with the possible exception of the Chemistry teacher.
Is it possible that you've entirely made up your mind on this for reasons of your own and that you posted your original question not in any hope or expectation of hearing something interesting, new or challenging but to give you the opportunity to expound your own views on it?
All the words in that sentence are simple and widely understood so it’s easily interpreted despite the spelling. It wouldn’t work as well with more obscure vocab as it would be less easy to interpret and it would be difficult to look up any words you didn’t know.
It also helps that its in lower case rather than all capitals. We recognise the shape of words not the letters that make them. Mixing up the letters but keeping the first and last letters in the right place keeps the word the right size and shape. If you think of cursive handwriting the word size and shape and the first and last letter is what you see as the letters are all joined together
When road signs were redesigned by Margert Calvert and co,, one of their innovations was a switch to lower case. Before then road signs were all capitals as that seemed to be the way to state something important but as traffic started to move faster it became more important to have clear word-shapes rather than bold letters.
Boring factoid. We talk about upper and lower case letters and thats the ref to how type setters' trays were laid out. Before that upper and lower case were called Magiscule and Minuscule respectively and they're really two different character sets for different applications.
Capitals are called capitals because their the script that would be carved onto the capitals of roman buildings. Capital letters are made from large circles and straight lines because they are for carving with a chisel. Its also a by design a letter set you would only write very short bits of information with. Lower case latter shapes letter forms that evolved for writing with a pen.
BEFORE CALVERT
After Calvert
It also helps that its in lower case rather than all capitals
That was something else the dyslexia specialist told me.
All my teaching career I'd been writing on the whiteboard in block capitals because I thought it was easier to read but she said the normal use of upper and lower case was better as block capital letters all looked similar to many dyslexics and others too.
So that's what I do now although I've asked pupils which they prefer and it doesn't seem so clear cut as the specialist suggested.
Capitals are called capitals because their the script...
Oh. Erm.
I view this as: something is written once but read many times. So misspellings mean that many people have to work that bit harder to ensure that what they've read is what the writer meant.
I'll often write "ont he" rather than my intended "on the" but I'll go back and correct it. I'll also go back over the whole post to make sure (hopefully) that I've not made any mistakes.
I find it amusing that it’s a rare reply on this forum about ‘correct’ use of English that doesn’t itself have errors
There's a name for this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
I have still not heard a convincing answer with the possible exception of the Chemistry teacher.
Oh you have. You've just not heard one you like.
Your typing seems generally well formed and correctly spelt. Why? y r u botherin if its not important u cud sav alot of tipin, perfecly readabl stil c
Capitalized?”
Bloody Yank.
Nope, that’s the correct english spelling.
Indeed. For all Webster's other bastardisations of our language, the notion that the Z is an Americanism is bogus. It was British English that migrated from -ZED to -SED, US English didn't change.
There is a Calvert exhibition coming to the design museum. Won’t be going by the looks if it, but hoping they put together a good book/programme to go with it.
https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/margaret-calvert-woman-at-work
You wouldn't be able to read the OP's misspelt phrases if you hadn't already learned correct spelling.
What BillMC said. It’s tolerance about a defined standard. Abandon the standard and the tolerance band that lets you get away with misspelling gets wider and wider until effectively there isn’t one.
My other half is from Switzerland and her native language is Swiss-German. She speaks English very well but doesn't have as wide a vocabulary as an English speaker of her intelligence would.
She reads books and documents on a Kindle or tablet and when she sees a word which she doesn't know she looks it up on the built in thesaurus. If the word is spelt incorrectly, the thesaurus won't recognise it and she won't increase her vocabulary.
English is hard enough to learn as it is with its inconsistencies, imagine how much harder it is if the words you are trying to learn aren't spelt right.
Most stuff these days is typed on devices with built in spell checkers so with the exception of phonetically similar words with different spelling and meanings (your, you're etc) there really is no excuse.
It's also just incorrect to use the wrong letters. For me in the sentence "The sekond world war started in 1938" The erroneous "k" is just as wrong as the "8". If you can't be trusted to get the letters right, why would I trust you with the numbers?
There is a Calvert exhibition coming to the design museum.
I find it fascinating that a handful of people have designed what Britain looks like - Calvert, David Mellor (not that one) and so on. You only notice the fabric of Britain has a 'look' when you leave and come back again but you don't really dwell on the fact that someone made that happen. Some of the worlds most enduring and successful design work and nobody really knows who these people are.
Beyond that it is for pedants and those who like to prove intellectual superiority,
Well thats a fall at the first hurdle if thats their intention. Literacy and spelling are not a higher intellectual function. People with downs syndrome can have excellent literacy. My mum has lost a vast amount of her cognitive abilities through dementia but can still read, write, spell perfectly well.
Because we made a decision at a point in time to start fixing spellings the written and spoken word are drifting apart. When you speak you're looking for the easiest and most efficient way to make word sounds. Your mouth skips over difficult parts of words and as we've become more of a close communication society - one to one, phone and broadcast rather than shouting in and to a crowd. Your ear wants to hear clear, clipped spaces between words but they are commonly not there. The difficulty people have comprehending foreign speech even though they have learned to speak a language is because you can't hear the spaces between words. People even struggle with unfamiliar accents simply because of a slight shift in rhythm and intonation of speech.
When you hear voices form the dawn of mass media you hear how people used to speak. in. spaced. in.di.vid.ual. syl.a.bles. Because people worked, socialised and moved in crowds, promenaded in the evenings, packed out churches on a Sunday and had to speak above background noise without microphones.
OurmodernspeechhasnospacesbetweenthewordsWegivelessroombetweensentancesthanAmyJohnsonwouldgiveeihesideofonesound.
Our written words spell our old speech, not our modern one, and we're left with wads of surplus letters for sounds our mouths don't make anymore. (our voices, especially women's, have gotten softer and deeper too - compare the sound of Amy Johnson to the sound of Woman's Hour)
An example I heard just this week - Nightingale. We would once have said and heard 'Nichtengaller' the sound of the letters on the page - but we can't be bothered with the effort to say that anymore. (Although local to me many people still do pronounce the 'ght' in light, night, right and so on.)
There is something interesting though with that smoother, easier speech. Words that sound very similar - thirst and first - chew and shoe - for instance - people who don't know they are spelled differently you can't hear the difference between then when they're spoken. When speaking them, you can spell them, the words feel different in your mouth even though they sound barely different
Heres a test to try to see how language drifts. "The Grand old Duke of York". Say it to yourself silently. Is your mouth making the shapes of 'Dy-ook' with a hard D as people would a century ago? Or are you actually saying 'Juke'?
On the ‘ALL CAPS’ v ‘lower case’ thing - I work in the digital industry with a focus on accessibility and I would never design a website using ALL CAPS anywhere simply because of the issues around readability.
On the ‘ALL CAPS’ v ‘lower case’ thing – I work in the digital industry with a focus on accessibility and I would never design a website using ALL CAPS anywhere simply because of the issues around readability.
and to add to that... One day I'm going to undertake a self-funded survey which would seek to prove my my hypothesis that there is a correlation between rates of violence in hospitals towards staff and the prevalence of Reactive Signage on yellow A4 conveying information in bold, 60 point, capital, serif, full justified justified text.
The OP's sentence is only readable because it's an exception. If we were all to write like that nothing would make sense.
We're conditioned to what words look like through reading.
I'm sure someone who doesn't read much would have trouble understanding the op.
It’s legible and it’s nigh on end of human kind therefore live a little.
(our voices, especially women’s, have gotten softer and deeper too – compare the sound of Amy Johnson to the sound of Woman’s Hour)
Is this not partly about modulating your speech for the technology available? Much easier to hear and understand clipped higher frequency speech on old small, frankly rubbish, wireless and TV speakers. And old telephones come to think of it. Not hard to imagine people adopting a specific “transmission voice” quite unlike the one they would use naturally in day to day chat at home. Or at least using an exaggerated tone with extra space. And then, of course, you have people using a reading voice when speaking pre-prepared texts for the camera or microphone… ever listened to someone reading aloud who’s not a very proficient reader? Especially someone nervous about being on camera/mic?
It’s legible and it’s nigh on end of human kind therefore live a little.
It's more understandable than that sentence.
Not hard to imagine people adopting a specific “transmission voice”
"This is a staff announcement..."
Cloze tests illustrate the issue. These are tests where random words are replaced with underlined spaces and students have to insert an appropriate word. For example:
John and I ______ as fast as we could away from the gunman.
A proficient reader will easily insert a word such as "run" or "sprint" into the space. This is based on gestalt psychology, where our minds see the big picture and fill in missing details. So we have quite a lot of tolerance for errors. If you've ever done serious proofreading, you'll know how hard it can be to spot errors (a common trick is to go through the text backwards, one line at a time so that you can focus on the details).
Anyway, we can usually fill in for mistakes, often without even registering them, but if they are frequent, it becomes an increasing burden and our reading speed slows down dramatically and our comprehension begins to suffer. On top of that, misspellings can cause misunderstandings, for example, last week I misspelled "principal components analysis" as "principle components analysis". For somebody familiar with the correct technical term, this wouldn't be a problem (just a tiny bit embarrassing for me), but for someone who needed to research what it meant, it would be misleading. That's why stuff gets proofread multiple times.
For an average person goofing around on the internet, it's not a big deal, but if you need to write in a professional capacity, bad spelling is a sign of sloppiness. Everyone makes the occasional typo, but professional people are expected to be able to spell correctly and to go back and proofread their work.
You're right, spelling is overated.
Often it paralyses kid's writing as they check each word rather than actually write. I'd much rather see wonderful, descrpitive and complex sentences spelled incorrectly than simple ones done perfectly.
One if the reasons spelling matters is related to our ability to acquire language. It's amazing how few letters of a word are required for the brain to fill in the rest. In fact, one theory of learning says we stop reading letters and words and basically see the pattern of shapes and know the word. Obviously that is much harder if words are never the same shape twice.
It also affects our ability to remember things (google the word frequency effect) and develop the ability to work with language. If you really want to understand that side of it, there is a lot of reading on how the human brain learns etc though.
Rubber_Buccaneer
Full Member
I’m not a teacher but I will have a go. Often being able to spell and being able to understand the difference between one spelling and another can make an important difference to your comprehension of, for exampleLadder operating instructions
Squirrel trap safety warnings
This deserved more recognition. Bravo!
One of the reasons that we have odd pronunciations with how some words are spelled out on the page was the vowel shift when the sounds of words changed, but generally not their spelling, plus of course mostly, our language as we know it now is a wide bastardised mix of Scandinavian, French, Britonic and middle/old English, with loads of others thrown in for measure.
spelling is overated
Fazackerly! Having been employed in the past as a publisher's reader and an exam reviser and examiner you internalize that style of reading and mistakes leap out at you. It's a bit like can swimming pool attendants ever have a relaxing beach holiday? I spent my career teaching comprehensive school kids that they too can read and understand Shakespeare, Catullus, Joyce, Marx and to drop the 'likes' and the sloppy speech. I could get away with it as an articulate cockney. Sloppy speech, spelling and grammar would only further disadvantage them in a class-ridden society. Oddly, when a strictly formal sentence comes into my head, so do ways of corrupting it with ambiguity, malapropisms and innuendo. Language is fun but only when you've mastered the rules so you know how they can be bent.
Speeling is important because it keeps in check the deviation from the agreed standard. If no-one attempted to speep correctly over time the speeppin would become so deviated from the accepted norm that no one would anymore be able to understand what it was that you were trying to apeep.
Like it or not, the acceptance of poor English language skills in education starts to swing the doors of various careers shut from an early age. Perhaps not as much as in former generations, but if you want children from less affluent backgrounds to have the same opportunities as others, then it makes sense to at least offer them the chance to succeed, even if they end up in a job which doesn't demand those qualities. It's the same principle as teaching maths to children at a higher level than the majority of jobs require. It preserves the opportunity for those who need it.
I spent my career teaching comprehensive school kids that they too can read and understand Shakespeare, Catullus, Joyce, Marx and to drop the ‘likes’ and the sloppy speech.
Sir, why is Joyce breaking all those rules you taught me? 🙂
The counter-argument is of course that a lot of the authors you teach were either less constrained by 'rules' at the time they were writing (Shakespeare, Chaucer etc), or chose to subvert them when it suited.
You could say that the current set state of grammar and spelling is a straitjacket on expression, and needs to be constantly tested so that language can evolve rather than be fixed in a corporately-acceptable form.
It is constantly evolving and is not a straightjacket and the writers who appeared in that contribution were simply people who we explored in different ways to uncover meaning and consider competing interpretations. I can't bear the formal pretentious crap my daughter has to teach, I was always on the look-out for a way in like, for example, the insults in Shakespeare's work. Get the kids laughing and you've got them on board.
our language as we know it now is a wide bastardised mix of Scandinavian, French, Britonic and middle/old English, with loads of others thrown in for measure.
This explains why we've mixtures of words with different etymologies and therefore multiple ways to spell them (bow, bough etc). But not why one way of spelling something is better than another. Bollocks to anyone who cites ambiguity. It you'd spelt 'cites' 'sights' or 'sites' in that sentence I'd have known what you mean, as I would have were you speaking.
Turkish, say, has complex roots with words a mixture of Arabic and Turkic, and was written in Arabic for hundreds of years, before they went over to roman script 90 or so years ago, with completely phonetic spelling, so spelling just isn't a thing. If you can speak you can spell (I taught there briefly so qualify to be on the thread).
That said, I always used to struggle with spelling when I was a kid though was otherwise good (annoyingly and precociously so) at English. Even now I'd not swear to how many 'n's ar in annoying. Whereas people like my wife honestly wonder why, if there's a right way to spell a word, you'd bother to spell it any other way.
No one has gone away and read Chomsky then? Or anyone else who's put the work in to help us understand why redundancy of letters when words are used in context is not a valid reason to abandon common ways of arranging letters to make words? People have spent their lives working on this stuff.
TLDR
Wh_le i_ i_ po__ible t_ under__and a sent__ce w_th mi__ing lett__s, th_t do_s n_t do aw_y wi_h the ne_d to h_ve a reasonably high volume of consistent spellings in our shared lexicon.
Bollocks to anyone who cites ambiguity. It you’d spelt ‘cites’ ‘sights’ or ‘sites’ in that sentence I’d have known what you mean, as I would have were you speaking.
Yes. But.
If you'd written "Bollocks to anyone who sights ambiguity" I'd have understood what you intended to say, but my brain would have initially tripped over your usage of the incorrect word. "You've seen... what... oh, 'cite,' right, of course." It changes the meaning of the sentence and makes for harder reading, it's a literal speed bump in your prose. "Sights" is no more valid here than saying "Bollocks to anyone who aardvarks ambiguity," the fact that it's a homophone doesn't give it validity. No what I mean?
It might be comprehensible but it's wrong and it pulls the reader out of the reading experience. It's like watching Downton Abbey and noticing that one of the maids is wearing a digital watch.
Yes. But.
If you’d written “Bollocks to anyone who sights ambiguity” I’d have understood what you meant to say, but my brain would have initially tripped over your usage of the wrong word. “You’ve seen… what… oh, ‘cite,’ right, of course.” It changes the meaning of the sentence and makes for harder reading, it’s a literal speed bump in your prose. “Sights” is no more valid here than saying “Bollocks to anyone who aardvarks ambiguity,” the fact it’s a homophone doesn’t give it validity. No what I mean?
It might be comprehensible but it’s wrong and it pulls the reader out of the reading experience. It’s like watching Downton Abbey and noticing that one of the maids is wearing a digital watch.
It requires subvocalisation (basically reading out loud in your head...) to understand that "sights" is actually "cites". That slows down reading, and needs a different part of the brain (we pretty much all subvocalise, but in varying amounts related to our reading ability but also the way we're reading what we're reading). It is, as Cougar says, understandable but it places the burden on the reader. Assuming the burden of getting it correct in the first place yourself is generally considered, I think, more respectful and therefore is "good behaviour".
Personally, I still think this is one of the big reasons why spelling/grammar matters, and certainly in some jobs etc would be frowned upon to expect the reader to sort out something that the author hasn't (bothered to?...).
Bollocks to anyone who aardvarks ambiguity
Or else I shall rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,
See if I don't.
thymine or thiamine - spelling makes a difference (Biology teacher).
Or else I shall rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,
See if I don’t.
I think I'd prefer the airlock.
This explains why we’ve mixtures of words with different etymologies and therefore multiple ways to spell them (bow, bough etc). But not why one way of spelling something is better than another
It's not better in the sense of being of a higher functional quality, it's just that it conforms to the conventions that other people use. It's like whether you drive on the left or the right - both work fine but they rely on everyone following the same convention. Minor transgressions aren't usually a problem - not indicating a left turn, for example - but if everyone just ignores the conventions, the system does start to break down. Employers want employees who can write formal correspondence, so being able to spell and punctuate is important if you want a white-collar job.
Here's an example of potential confusion. It's obvious this is a typo, "chanced" should be "changed", because the Tweet corrects it, but the story is related to statistics and odds (i.e. chances) so there's always a possibility that "chance" is used in some technical sense that laypeople aren't familiar with. Distracting when someone who makes their living as a writer is sloppy like this.
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1319433722454790150
No one has gone away and read Chomsky then? Or anyone else who’s put the work in to help us understand why redundancy of letters when words are used in context is not a valid reason to abandon common ways of arranging letters to make words? People have spent their lives working on this stuff.
TLDR
Wh_le i_ i_ po__ible t_ under__and a sent__ce w_th mi__ing lett__s, th_t do_s n_t do aw_y wi_h the ne_d to h_ve a reasonably high volume of consistent spellings in our shared lexicon.
@kelvin, why would they have read Chomsky if they didn't know he had done some work in this field? And if they did, they probably didn't need to go away and re-read his stuff for the purposes of contributing to this thread. (Also, I believe thoughts have moved on since Chomsky's work, so there are probably more up-to-date sources to go to.) Why not give us a nice summary of the work that has been done, or point us in the direction of a handy summary of it, there probably is one on Wikipedia? That would be really helpful, because most of us are not sufficiently up with this to know what to search for and would struggle to get there using our own resources.
If you’d written “Bollocks to anyone who sights ambiguity” I’d have understood what you intended to say, but my brain would have initially tripped over your usage of the incorrect word.
I'm arguing against using multiple ways of spelling words that sound the same but mean different things. They manage to do this in plenty of other languages which are spelt phonetically. If they sound the same, spell them the same way. This would make reading and learning to read easier.
On the needing things to be spelt differently to understand them when reading at speed, I again call bollocks. This doesn't apply when you're listening to spoken language, and in written language homonyms are rarely going to trip anyone up. "She bit a bit of my skin, for a bit." Dunno where that came from. Also, puns.
I’ll often write “ont he” rather than my intended “on the” but I’ll go back and correct it.
I often write "a****s" instead of "accounts". That one really does need correcting!
It requires subvocalisation (basically reading out loud in your head…) to understand that “sights” is actually “cites”. That slows down reading, and needs a different part of the brain (we pretty much all subvocalise, but in varying amounts related to our reading ability but also the way we’re reading what we’re reading). It is, as Cougar says, understandable but it places the burden on the reader. Assuming the burden of getting it correct in the first place yourself is generally considered, I think, more respectful and therefore is “good behaviour”.
Couldn't agree more.
Or in modern parlance, this x1000.
It made sense to the author as they wrote it, but requires extra capacity from the reader to get the message as intended. Like people who type complex sentences with sub-clauses, colloquial expressions and exclamations thrown in, without a single piece of punctuation. You almost have to read it twice to get the message they were trying to convey.
Written English is not without its faults though. I'd love to see the upside down question mark that marks the begining of a Spanish sentence come to all languages for example.
A gender neutral term for the singular possesive would be useful, as would a plural "you" in common usage.
I often write “a****s” instead of “accounts”.
I once typed "public spending cu*ts" instead of "public spending cuts" when I was writing an undergraduate essay back in the days of manual typewriters. I couldn't be arsed to correct it seeing as it nicely summed up my opinion. Professor was slightly amused.
On the needing things to be spelt differently to understand them when reading at speed, I again call bollocks. This doesn’t apply when you’re listening to spoken language, and in written language homonyms are rarely going to trip anyone up. “She bit a bit of my skin, for a bit.” Dunno where that came from. Also, puns.
You can't hear as fast as you can read, and the brain processes the two things differently. Subvocalisation is more or less "hearing" - skim reading, without (or more correctly with little) subvocalisation is much faster but doesn't work for all cases.
“She bit a bit of my skin, for a bit.”
This is an example of a case where reading has to slow down to allow proper understanding. It's difficult to understand without "stopping on it" for a (short) while. Because of that, personally, I think that this is a poor sentence. "She bit some of my skin for a while" would be much clearer, can be read much faster and removes ambiguity and difficulty. Poor English isn't just poor spelling, and this is a case of a poorly constructed sentence for other reasons, and the points about where the burden lies apply just as much to this as they do to poor spelling.
Speaking of subvocalisation, have you tried working your way through Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks?
One of the most painful reading experiences I can remember, probably even overtaking Chaucer's 'Tales of Caunterbury'. I felt I had to finish it having bought the damn thing but it definitely wasn't one I'd recommend.
On the needing things to be spelt differently to understand them when reading at speed, I again call bollocks. This doesn’t apply when you’re listening to spoken language
But conversational language is two-way communication, there’s a margin for misunderstanding which can be easily clarified. You can adjust your delivery on the fly to fit your target audience, eg trying to soften broad Lancashire when speaking to Americans.
If you read something ambiguous you can’t ask a book what it meant, written English has to be held to a higher standard than conversational. Similarly, when (say) giving a presentation, you'd generally take more care over forming clear, understandable English than if you were telling someone about your sexual proclivities.
It's only one character in Feersum Endjinn as I recall, and while non-standard the spelling is consistent!
If you read something ambiguous you can’t ask a book what it meant,
They manage in phonetically spelt languages. Do you need a different spelling for "live" meaning will give you an electric shock, "live" meaning not recorded, "live" meaning reside?
Do you need a different spelling for “live” meaning will give you an electric shock
... potentially.
“live” meaning not recorded, “live” meaning reside?
That's actually a good example of where it should be spelt differently, they aren't homophones. Spoken they're clearly two different words, written they're ambiguous.
"I've seen Elvis live."
"Really?"
"Yeah, he was up partying all night, that boy really knew how to live."
See also, 'read.' I'm going to read this book, then once I've finished I'll have read it.
Standardised spelling makes it easier to read. I can (and did) read Iain Banks' Feersum Endjinn. After the first 100 pages I was quite comfortable with the phonetic spelling but I wouldn't want to have to do the same with every email, website, squirrel culling device instruction.
That’s actually a good example of where it should be spelt differently, they aren’t homophones. Spoken they’re clearly two different words, written they’re ambiguous
Should be? It isn't. Either way, you've just demonstrated that in practice your're fine with phonetic spelling.
