Zompist Bboard Again

In English theres the phenomenon known as the "greengrocers apostrophe", in which the apostrophe's which should be doing duty marking possessibe's and contraction's instead turn up on plural's and, less commonly, third person singular's.

In Spanish, my spie's tell me, its not unusual to mik's up <b> and <v>.

What other example's from other language's can you think of?

The verbal endings -er (infinitive), -é (past participle), -ez (second person plural in some tenses) in French, all pronounced /e/, are confused waaaay too often, mainly in favour of the first ending.

It happens a lot in German, a language that doesn't really use the apostrophe natively, under the influence of English. I even once saw a sign on a gyros stand inscribed Gyro's.

I'm not sure what the "rules" are in my own head exactly, but I have an urge to add an apostrophe for some plurals. I think it's maybe acronyms or words that usually aren't plural, but even there it's a limited set. An example might be PC's for "personal computers", not "personal computer's". For some reason, PCs feels wrong, like the "s" could just be part of the anacronym, so the apostrophe sort of separates the "s", highlighting that it's attached as a clitic rather than part of the anacronym. I know this is wrong, but it just feels so right!

Vilike wrote: ↑Mon Feb 14, 2022 4:42 am The verbal endings -er (infinitive), -é (past participle), -ez (second person plural in some tenses) in French, all pronounced /e/, are confused waaaay too often, mainly in favour of the first ending.

Does that mean you see things like "vous aver manger le pain" or "vous voulé mangez le pain"?

Mistakes in divers' language strike me as potentially deadly. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Vardelm wrote: ↑Mon Feb 14, 2022 8:57 am For some reason, PCs feels wrong, like the "s" could just be part of the anacronym, so the apostrophe sort of separates the "s", highlighting that it's attached as a clitic rather than part of the anacronym. I know this is wrong, but it just feels so right!

This could be an influence from letter names— e.g. "mind your P's and Q's." That is actually correct, and may lead to the overgeneralization of using it with acronyms too.

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Feb 14, 2022 10:32 am

Vardelm wrote: ↑Mon Feb 14, 2022 8:57 am For some reason, PCs feels wrong, like the "s" could just be part of the anacronym, so the apostrophe sort of separates the "s", highlighting that it's attached as a clitic rather than part of the anacronym. I know this is wrong, but it just feels so right!

This could be an influence from letter names— e.g. "mind your P's and Q's." That is actually correct, and may lead to the overgeneralization of using it with acronyms too.

It hasn’t always been considered incorrect to use apostrophes to pluralize acronyms/initialisms: I think style guides have become more against it than they were formerly. I think apostrophes are especially likely to be seen when the period is included, as in “P.C.’s” rather than “P.C.s”.

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Feb 14, 2022 10:32 am ...may lead to the overgeneralization insightful application of using it with acronyms too.

Fix't.

Estav wrote: ↑Mon Feb 14, 2022 10:52 am I think apostrophes are especially likely to be seen when the period is included, as in “P.C.’s” rather than “P.C.s”.

Yeah, that would be my sense of how it works as well.

I used to not pluralize acronyms and abbreviations with apostrophes, but over time I have come to do so rather consistently for whatever reason.

Vardelm wrote: ↑Mon Feb 14, 2022 8:57 am I'm not sure what the "rules" are in my own head exactly, but I have an urge to add an apostrophe for some plurals. I think it's maybe acronyms or words that usually aren't plural, but even there it's a limited set. An example might be PC's for "personal computers", not "personal computer's". For some reason, PCs feels wrong, like the "s" could just be part of the anacronym, so the apostrophe sort of separates the "s", highlighting that it's attached as a clitic rather than part of the anacronym. I know this is wrong, but it just feels so right!

And if enough people agree, it will become right. I confess I do it myself...

In a (probably futile) attempt to reorient this thread: what are common or characteristic spelling mistakes in other languages?

Anything involving one-to-many mappings of phonemes and graphemes is the source of misspellings in Spanish. Just a few days ago I saw my father writing quice instead of quise 'I wanted'. I find mistakes involving b/v, c/s/z, y/ll all the time. Also missing or mis-added h's, as h doesn't represent a phoneme (exibir for exhibir, etc.).

A more interesting mistake is word-final -a -e -o being confused for each other, especially in adjectives, which can superficially look like gender misagreement, but I think it has its origins in speakers mentally pronouncing the adjectives so fast the final vowel comes out as a schwa [ə], besides some "muscle memory" that induces typos. Esa bueno señora may represent [ˈbwenə]. Unlike b/v, c/s, y/ll mistakes, I've detected mistakes of this sort even in newspapers, like Spain's El Mundo, probably because it's more subtle in some ways.

The rules of the use of the acute accent are also opaque for most speakers (more than 90%), even complicated. I find many native speakers can't even tell what the stressed syllable/vowel of a word is, even though they naturally use stress correctly, which makes the rules very hard to use, assuming they know them at all. Unless they're professional editors or basically language nerds, most people rely purely on memory and analogy to apply the acute accent. Mistakes abound.

Overall, I am impressed by how less commonly I come across misspellings in English though, whether IRL here in Metro Vancouver, or on the Internet in Discord chats and elsewhere. Spanish speakers seem like such worse misspellers in general, even though the writing system is easier... Maybe something positive can be said about the way English speakers in the US/UK/Canada/Australia/NZ learn to write??

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Sat Feb 19, 2022 2:53 pm Overall, I am impressed by how less commonly I come across misspellings in English though, whether IRL here in Metro Vancouver, or on the Internet in Discord chats and elsewhere. Spanish speakers seem like such worse misspellers in general, even though the writing system is easier... Maybe something positive can be said about the way English speakers in the US/UK/Canada/Australia/NZ learn to write??

To me at least, modern English spelling only partially attempts to even pretend to be phonemic, so I naturally tend to treat whole words or at least morphemes as graphemes, whereas with Spanish it is tempting to treat its spelling as sequences of graphemes that partially map to phonemes, so it is much easier to make mistakes due to the fact that they do not really map to phonemes. (Of course when learning spelling initially English spelling has to be treated as phonemic and then kids have to learn the exceptions, because "whole spelling" does not really work, but that is another story.)

Question: how many Spanish speakers in Vancouver use Spanish primarily as a spoken language? I think I would suck at spelling too if nobody taught me how to write the language in school.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sun Feb 20, 2022 8:28 pm Question: how many Spanish speakers in Vancouver use Spanish primarily as a spoken language? I think I would suck at spelling too if nobody taught me how to write the language in school.

I'm not thinking about heritage speakers in Vancouver (who generally don't venture into writing it at all, although I do know one such guy who tries!). I am thinking about full-blown native Spanish speakers from Latin America living in a capital city in Latin America, who have at least a completed high school education. Dunno about Spain.

For the most part, Lithuanian has a pretty strict one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, with the notable exception of some vowels:

/iː/ ⟨į, y⟩
/uː/ ⟨ų, ū⟩
/ɛ/ ⟨e, ia⟩
/æː/ ⟨e, ę, ią⟩
/aː/ ⟨a, ą⟩

As you would expect, whether to write the little tail or not is pretty much the biggest headache of middle school Lithuanian, and seeing ⟨*ačių⟩ "thank you" is par for the course.

Of course, this is the result of two recent sound changes. /ia/ became /ɛ/, and the vowels with the "little tail" were nasal vowels which recently lost their nasalization.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 7:46 am the vowels with the "little tail" were nasal vowels which recently lost their nasalization.

Natively, we still call the letters ⟨a nosinė⟩ "nasal ⟨a⟩", ⟨e nosinė⟩ "nasal ⟨e⟩" etc. Of course, since there's no nasality that a modern native speaker can notice, the most logical way to interpret the name is something like "a-handkerchief" or "e-handkerchief".

CreativityTheEmotion wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 12:33 pm

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 7:46 am the vowels with the "little tail" were nasal vowels which recently lost their nasalization.

Natively, we still call the letters ⟨a nosinė⟩ "nasal ⟨a⟩", ⟨e nosinė⟩ "nasal ⟨e⟩" etc. Of course, since there's no nasality that a modern native speaker can notice, the most logical way to interpret the name is something like "a-handkerchief" or "e-handkerchief".

There's probably a separate thread in there about amusing names given to diacritics in various languages