Quote:
Originally Posted by BookCat
I'd noticed the same misspellings and they bothered me a little also. However, I've heard that the latest incarnation of MS Word has context-sensitive spell-check which would catch the type of error which vrodbrad has made. Traditional spell-checking would pass them as okay; the words are correctly spelled but the wrong word: right/write, there/their/, etc.
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Or you could just learn what the words mean, so you wouldn't have to guess which spelling transcribes which sound.
This whole thing comes from children being taught, not the meanings of words, but the means to reproduce sounds from those words, then understand the sounds. Not only does this produce people who can't understand any word they haven't heard, but it produces people who don't know if they mean "hear" or "here" because they don't look at it as hearing being the function of the ear, while here is a place like there. They're just guessing at which spelling is "right" for the sound "heer".
And that makes me think of foreign languages, and one of the useful things I learned from a teacher who I didn't properly appreciate until much later: If you learn a foreign language, you will
never become fluent if you only speak it by translating it to your native language. If you have to translate
el libro into
the book and only then recognize it as meaning that thing with covers and pages, you'll always be waiting for your mental translator, and never really
understand the language; only by mentally filing "el libro" as a sort of a synonym, along side "textbook", "volume", "tome", etc., to be used similarly in the proper context (in this case, when speaking Spanish), will you be able to speak it as an actual language.
People used to laugh about unintelligent people who moved their lips when they read. Now it's hard to find someone who doesn't, and even most of them still don't actually understand what they're reading; they understand what they're hearing, and have to translate the words into sounds first (even if they keep their lips still). That's one reason, by the way, that people for whom English is a foreign language tend to use it more correctly than native speakers: in many cases, they learned to read and write it (usually online) before they heard it spoken, so they learned what the words mean, not what they sound like. "Hear" and "here" are two totally different words to someone who's read them but rarely or never heard them, so he naturally uses the proper one.
When I see a mistake in homophones, like "right" for "write", I know I'm dealing with someone who reads little and understands less. It's not a mistake someone who reads extensively would make. You
can't read very fast if you have to sound out every word, and you can't read a lot if you don't read fast, at least not if you have anything else that needs to be done, which nearly everybody does.
And the smartest word processor in the world isn't going to impart knowledge of the written word to the ignorant. The only cure for ignorance is learning, and while other people can offer you things to learn, it is still something you have to do yourself.