• Ephera
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    142 years ago

    The thing is that native speakers and people who are very fluent, will start to write how they would say it, without really thinking about it. And then, because the pronunciation is identical, they’ll mess up there.

    • Marxism-FennekinismOP
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      2 years ago

      I mean, I’m Chinese, we have literally thousands of characters that sound identical to at least one other character but mean completely different things, and many characters with more than one other character with the same pronunciation. If Chinese speakers can deal with that, I think English speakers can deal with the twenty or so times it happens throughout the entire language.

    • erpicht
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      92 years ago

      Is that so? I often* say such things as coulda, musta, gotta, thinkin’, 'bout and s’pose, all of which feature word shortening or changed pronunciation, yet produce negligible effect 'pon mine orthography.

      *pronounced without the t sound, you heathens! Unless you also say soften and fasten

      • Ephera
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        52 years ago

        Assuming that’s German (also my native language), I would say the difference is that German has far fewer recent influences from other languages and also had relatively recent standardization efforts on spelling, so there’s usually a unique spelling for a given pronunciation.

        And when we do have unusual pronunciations like in “team”, “garage”, “handy”, you can’t really mix them up with another word.

    • SudoDnfDashY
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      42 years ago

      I usually just go with “could’ve”, which is how I say it IRL anyway.

    • erpicht
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      22 years ago

      I find incorrect verb tenses to be more annoying, which is unfortunately becoming the norm in places for which this is not a variation due to dialect. Things such as, could have ran, drank, sang, or swore, and so on, in the stead of the correct could have run, drunk, sung, and sworn.

  • @pingveno@lemmy.ml
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    82 years ago

    It’s been said that English is a language that is easy to speak/write poorly, but hard to speak/write well. It’s a mutt of a language, combining many disparate and conflicting backgrounds. The pronunciation is always going to be confusing because the parent languages have absolutely loony pronunciation. Yeah, I’m looking at you, French, with your weird ass dropping of letters. Plus it’s undergone a great deal of evolution. Anyone who turns their nose up at deviation from “proper English” ignores that their own use of English is a deviation from just decades prior.