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.

[–] HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 21 points 2 years ago* (last edited 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@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 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

[–] sexy_peach@feddit.de 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is not true for my native language.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 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.