Also, please be civil this person was actually pretty chill about getting totally destroyed for this crazy take. I mostly just wanted to document this moment.
IDK, I kinda respect this one. He didn’t delete it, he stuck to his guns, and this isn’t, like, a really reprehensible take it’s just regular dumb
Yeah, I’d prefer this then a reprehensible comment.
So this, then that. Then what: than?
This just feels like those kids who never learn to tie their shoelaces and then say they leave them loose on purpose because it’s cooler.
Stop calling me out
Top tip: Avoid having to distinguish between there, their and they’re, buy simply using the gender neutral thair.
buy
Your a monster
Why waist time learn many word when few word do trick?
This is not a top tip; it’s a pro tip!
Yeah, avoid having to distinguish between tops and bottoms by using “pro” for tips.
English needs a gender neutral singular pronoun other than they.
I vote for “e, em, ey, eir”
“Have you called Jace?”
“No, never spoken to em. What’s eir phone number?”
Because Jace is a gender neutral name, and the second speaker doesn’t know eir gender, a singular neutral pronoun is perfect. Rather than using the funky plural pronoun that already has a use for groups.
“yoosing kerect spelling hurts my pheeleegs, so I narver yoos it.”
You’re clearly dealing with a top level intellect here
When you think you fucked up enough to end up on these kinda subs but it turns out it isn’t you .
This reminds me that Lemmy is niche enough that I could’ve picked pretty much any word as my username, I feel dumb for not taking advantage of that opportunity.
Yeah not really that easy to get usernames on big instances like shitjustworks or lemmee but maybe you really didn’t have to try that hard to get one on lemmy. zip tho .
You’ll have your time soon enough :)
You know, they’ve got a very valid point. Language is spoken before it is written and it changes with time. I’ve got the opinion that orthography should be subordinate to pronunciation. If ‘then’ and ‘than’, historically pronounced differently, become homophone, they could be written the same.
I’m tired of English and French orthographies being so conservative, writing words like they were pronounced hundreds of years ago…
But a differentiation is needed in this scenario. “Then” suggests a continuation, while “Than” suggests an alternative.
“I’d rather eat cake than have a pineapple up the bum” “I’d rather eat cake then have a pineapple up the bum”
I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t be saying the second sentence verbally.
I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t be saying the second sentence verbally.
It is important to consider how best to communicate such requests. Perhaps as part of a sonnet would be appropriate?
I know that the words are different and have different meanings, and I know that some speakers pronounce them differently so I wouldn’t change the orthography now.
My point is: let’s not be so conservative that orthography has to be fixed forever. If they become homophones, the orthography could change and they could be homonyms like so many others exist.
My own comment on the thread is relevant to yours 😁
Oh, I know the English rules very well, and those of French, and those of Dutch, and those of Portuguese, and those of German.
Of all the orthographies that I know, French and English are the dumbest by far, because they are the most conservative. It’s not because you struggled to learn that you should feel superior to others. Pride in a dumb orthographic system can only be understood through elitism.
Since when is there “the” English way of pronouncing stuff? Same for French? I learned to pronounce then and than differently and stumble while reading if it is misspelled.
“I’m used to it” is a pretty lousy excuse for an orthographic system. It’s the very definition of conservatism.
And yeah, you raise a valid point! In standardized languages, there is a linguistic effect of “speak like printed” but that’s emergent and not the initial purpose of orthography. The goal of orthography is to transpose a spoken language to writing.
This was actually a problem faced by German orthographists. The letter ‘ä’ was being pronounced /ɛː/ even if the vowel was not part of German phonology. That’s where the term “speak like printed” comes from (“sprechen wie gedruck”).
Oh I disagree in the conservatism because my argument is: we can’t normalize written language because the phonetics in one language is wastly different in different regions and either we go to the pre Grimm “everyone writes as they speak” or there’s normalization.
That’s what confuses me: your definition of what the orthographic systems are supposed to solve differs from what l got taught: That people started writing preserve information - the phonetic alphabets were then adopted because (oversimplification!) it was easier.
My professor of historic German (Mittelhochdeutsch, not sure of the proper translation) always joked about the “sprechen wie gedruckt” people in Germany who claimed to talk “proper” German because of all the changes in language which get reflected over time into the main language (do you go “zu Aldi” or “nach Aldi” for example are regional directional expressions.
What is preserved is the clear meaning of things and standardization.
To get back to the OP: The standards are needed to prevent phonetic writing to alter the meaning of a sentence away from what the senders intend or puts a burden onto the reader to decipher. And that’s the risk when mixing relation and time (than/then).
From my perspective the discussion comes down to “who puts energy into the communication, the sender or the reader”. And for a lot of these examples it is less energy for the author than it is for the reader to then establish a common understanding.
That said: I find it fascinating to read such a different take on that topic and learn new things, thank you!
Thank you for your insightful reply and for engaging in discussion!
I absolutely agree with your stance on standardization. I’m confronted directly to this issue with the Walloon language. There has been no standardization and the current “Feller” orthographic consensus is to mix analogy to French (to facilitate the intuitive writing by French speakers), and phonetics (every author writes with its personal pronunciation). So there’s a gazillion ways of writing the same word and it has definitely been an issue for the language survival. Standardization is useful because it does include some amount of abstraction so that the same orthography can be used by speakers of different regions with their local variation of the language.
That being said, there is an actual effort for standard orthographies to agree with phonetics. The orthographies of standardized languages such as German (last reform in 1996), Dutch (last reform in 2006), Portuguese (last reform in 1990) have been modified and updated so that they reflect changes that took place in the pronunciations and simplify obsolete rules. French has actually a very phonetic orthography from the… 12th century. The last in-depth reform of French orthography was 1835, with a small-scale rectification in 1990 that’s been largely opposed. As for English, the reforms are even rarer with a single successful reform in 1828 for American spelling. That’s what I meant by conservatism. I wouldn’t call German orthography conservative at all, to the contrary.
In the case of “then/than”, like I said there’s no need to reform their spelling because they are not homophones for everyone. I do however think that their use is significantly different so that homonyms wouldn’t alter understanding. Difficulties would mainly arise from habit. In the example given by @Schal330@lemmy.world:
“I’d rather eat cake than have a pineapple up the bum” and “I’d rather eat cake then have a pineapple up the bum”
are theoretically already pronounced identically by some native speakers. Why is there no misunderstanding orally? I guess either the intonation that can be marked by a comma, or the addition of “and”:
“I’d rather eat cake, then have a pineapple up the bum”.
“I’d rather eat cake and then have a pineapple up the bum”.
No more ambiguity.
I understand where he’s coming from, but he’s also explaining it poorly and using it to be a defensive dick.
I have the same issue when writing “could’ve”, I default to “could of” because of some silly childhood habit, and despite knowing better I still write “could of” out of habit all the time, and I don’t pick up on it when proof reading because they are spoken the same way.
He’s talking about the accent of his internal monologue/ sub vocalisations when reading.
In my accent, “than” and “then” sound completely different, but in some accents they’re practically homophones.
When you cross that with someone who is a phonetic writer, or has language disabilities like dyslexia, you end up writing the more commonly used word. When proof reading you don’t realise your mistake because the voice in your head reads those two words the exact same way, and if you’re dyslexic you’re not going to know it’s wrong from looking at it.
I’ve read it 6 times and it all makes perfect sense, reading it again is only going to help me find the remaining mistakes because of a luck based numbers game.
it takes me 40 minutes to proof read a 25 word email if it’s important enough, because I know myself, I have found errors after that long.
That’s why I do sometimes get frustrated when kind well meaning people correct my grammar and spelling. It’s helpful and I do appreciate it, but it’s not that I don’t “know” the correct grammar, or why my grammar was wrong, it’s that no one game through with a neon sign to highlight where the error was and I genuinely can’t see it until it’s pointed out to me, or even if I know there’s an error, I really, genuinely, do not care anymore. That’s not because I take no pride in my literacy, it’s the opposite…
There’s nothing worse than spending 8 times longer proof reading a comment than you spent drafting it. And your pour over it and really apply yourself to finding the errors. You find 40 mistakes the first time you read it, another 10 the next time, 3 the next. You find no mistakes the next 2 times you re-read it, you ask a friend to read it, so they skim it quickly say “it’s fine”. Then you hit “post” and you immediately spot another mistake so you quickly edit it, silly me, how did I not see that before posting!? Then someone replies to it and you go back to refresh yourself on what it was you wrote so you can better have a discussion and you spot another error in your original comment! How did that error slip through so many checks! Better re-re-re-re-re-re-read it again now while I’m already editing it.
Then a well meaning person says “by the way, it’s “than” not “then”.” which is a completely neutral and polite post, but considering I’ve spent hours thinking about all the mistakes in the comment, I’ve spent longer than most people spend on proof reading, I hear you trying to help, but all I’m feeling is the world calling me an illiterate idiot after I’ve finished exhausting myself doing practical things to improve my literacy.
These spell check comments make me angry, not at the person trying to help me learn. But angry at myself for being a fucking moron, for wasting years of my life working twice as hard to achieve half as much, with my best being better than my best ever was and still in some instances being seen as having not tried at all.
What’s worse is then I’m reading my comment for the 700th time trying to find where I’ve used “then” where I should have used “than” and even though I know now what mistake I’m looking for, I can’t see it!
I’ve gone so far as to ctrl+F “of” in a 6 page report from work because a co-worker was running out the door to grab something for an event, made a comment about me needing to change “of to have” in the report but couldn’t remember what page just that she noticed it, and off she went.
I’d already read this thing well over 50 times. I went through one by fucking one to try and find where I had written “could of”, but I could not find it.
Whatever, it was no longer worth it. I printed them off, and I’ve grabbed a random bunch of pages to start folding the booklets and as I’ve grabbed it, directly above my thumb, clear as day, bright as sun, fucking “could of”.
Did I go back and print off another batch of copies now that I’d found it? Yes (felt guilty the whole time, what a waste of paper)
The worse part, my co-worker comes back, we finish setting up, we’re putting booklets on guests chairs and my cooworker flicks through one and says “aw, you didn’t get a chance to fix the “could’ of” mistake.” because it turns out there were 2 instances that I’d missed while going through it word by word. Of course as soon as she said it, I could see it. In my defence she’d only spotted the one, not the original 2 in the copy I gave her for proofing…or the original 20 in the copy I proofed myself.
So after all that, when someone who doesn’t know me corrects my spelling, I’m grateful, but I don’t care, I’m burnt out on fixing it, I cared too hard too much in the hours I was proof reading it before you got here, and I know it’s incorrect, and I know self improvement is important, but come back in a week when I’m not angry and frustrated at myself and this text.
Friend, I just read your whole post. Keep in mind that your mental health should be more important to you than (♥) anything else!
May I suggest just giving yourself enough leeway to keep the mental capacity to shrug of random internet people? We - your NPCs - should never be as important in regards to your own health!
What you’re describing sounds to me way different though - you only share the same symptoms! I get the feeling that you strife for perfection in how others perceive you. OP on the other hand is a tuna sandwich dick.
Please feel appreciated this day for the thoughts you make and the effort you put in no matter what the internet points tell you.
There will probably never be a more downvoted comment on lemmy then this one.
Than I become most downvoted comment on Lemmy
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen worse…
What was the last phrase, out of interest?
Legitimately crazy take, no doubt.
