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[Telgin]

And I just do double because it's how I was brought up.

Same here.  It's what I learned in keyboarding class and it stuck.  I double space stuff on web pages too, even though most of the time it doesn't show up without HTML entities for non breaking spaces (it appears to work correctly here though).


And in regards to the they're / their / there and your / you're mixup: these drive me up the wall.  I was reading a walkthrough to a computer game yesterday and kept running into this and it snapped me out of reading it every time it happened.  There were lots of grammatical problems besides of course, but that kept slapping me in the eyes.  I actually put emphasis on the 're versions of the words when I speak, partly because getting it wrong annoys me.

It's kind of like then / than.  That drives me up the wall too, even if it has nothing to do with apostrophes.  When I see otherwise coherent and intelligent writing that has "greater then" or "more then" in it somewhere, I get sad. 

[Thecard]

Wait, how would Dyslexia not allow you to notice that?

[fqllve]

Dyslexia covers a whole bunch of learning disabilities. It just means you have trouble reading.

[Thecard]

I thought it only referred to the switching of letters.
Ah well, I'm not dyslexic, don't take it from me.

[Starver]

Wait, how would Dyslexia not allow you to notice that?

If that was about my revelation about my "thair" friend, I don't understand the question about it.  He was(/is) dyslexic, although nobody (who mattered) knew about dyslexia back when we were both at school.  His spelling was universally awful probably because of the dyslexia making it impossible (unaided) to learn, and thus the use of "thair" did not stand out as a peculiarity to third-parties.  (I actually don't know what it looked like to him, but he was very consistent with that particular 'writo', so maybe it was a pattern of letters that clicked, or that combination was capable of bashing its way through the wall of obfuscation that the dyslexia caused, and so was taken as a 'bedrock' word that didn't suffer quite as much as its correctly-spelt semi-phonetically similar siblings.)

All this has as a background that he was pretty much 'streamed' in the lower set of classes (full of the... not mentally tip-top people, plus disruptive and awkward pupils who may or may not have been that way because they were not the smartest and/or suffering from similar undiagnosed learning impediments and were thus playing to type) and yet I consider him to be at least my equal (I was in the 'top-end' classes, but actually didn't fulfil my potential[1]), if not far cleverer.  Certainly socially more capable.  (For one thing, he doesn't go around claiming he's more intelligent than other people!)  But back then he was just another "awkward one", whether anyone considered it a wilful awkwardness or not.


[1] In a couple of cases because I may have been bored by what was being taught, and in others because I was the put-upon 'swot' and thus disrupted by bad elements, but neither of these things can I consider to be anything more than excuses...  The point is that I think I'm pretty intelligent, and I think he's more so, but was hindered more than me.  These days (if we were young again) he'd have got a lot more help and who knows where that would have gotten him!  As it was he's since become a published author.  Not to great acclaim, but it's certainly more than I've done...  And I was the initial proof-reader of two of the books (or certainly one of the initial proof-readers, when it was still at the 'family and friends' stage), as well as long-term friend throughout school, so I'm fairly confident of the salient facts on this one.  But I think I digress.

[Thecard]

Wait, how would Dyslexia not allow you to notice that?

If that was about my revelation about my "thair" friend, I don't understand the question about it.

I ask because I've been told dyslexia is only the failure to recognize sequences of letters.  There is no "a" in their.  But I'm no expert, nor do I have firsthand experience.
As I... y'know, stated in the comment above yours.

[fqllve]

I thought it only referred to the switching of letters.
Ah well, I'm not dyslexic, don't take it from me.

Yeah, that's a surprisingly common belief and I'm not sure how it came about. I think letter and syllable transposition might be the most common form of dyslexia, but don't quote me on that. My sister is dyslexic though, and she mostly has problems correlating sounds to letters and vice versa.

Although the disorder varies from person to person, common characteristics among people with dyslexia are difficulty with phonological processing (the manipulation of sounds), spelling, and/or rapid visual-verbal responding.

[Starver]

I ask because I've been told dyslexia is only the failure to recognize sequences of letters.  There is no "a" in their.  But I'm no expert, nor do I have firsthand experience.
As I... y'know, stated in the comment above yours.

Didn't see that.  Must have blanked the "one more message while you were writing" thing.

Spoiler: ...and if you're still needing the question addressing, my thoughts (click to show/hide)

Not being a 'sufferer' myself (and not, right now, in a position to question the guy concerned) I can't say for certain but as far as I'm concerned it was (in this case) because of the apparent hopelessness of attaining a desirable level of literacy that a deliberate affectation of this kind was developed.  (And, like I said maybe the word "thair" was less prone to 'resequencing' and could be more easily repeated...)

This may or may not be the whole story.  For example, given that a == e flipped over maybe there wasn't just translational jumbling (at least a partial explanation for "their"->"thair").  But I just can't put myself in the kind of head that works like that, so who knows.

As an adult (happily married, self-employed in a job that needs a lot of reading, and having been a published author as already mentioned) he's very obviously developed coping strategies.  His raw spelling still isn't perfect ("sward" for "sword", for example) but I've definitely seen worse.  (Even ignoring completely stuff like the archetypal YouTube comments excepted, being so bad that it's no credit to anyone to be compared to them... even favourably!)

[Thecard]

Yeah.  I've known some people who didn't let those things stop them too.  Learning disabilities don't necessarily hinder the mind, as some people seem to forget.

[Machiavelli]

And in regards to the they're / their / there and your / you're mixup: these drive me up the wall.  I was reading a walkthrough to a computer game yesterday and kept running into this and it snapped me out of reading it every time it happened.  There were lots of grammatical problems besides of course, but that kept slapping me in the eyes.  I actually put emphasis on the 're versions of the words when I speak, partly because getting it wrong annoys me.

Yes.  I can HEAR when people don't know the difference.  I get angry when it happens and I correct them.  I suppose my socials skill points were allocated to grammar instead.

[fqllve]

You can hear when people confuse homophones?

e: Despite my skepticism, I've found some papers which suggest it's possible (This is the most relevant, if anyone's interested). But they all seem to say frequency is the main factor, whereas there/their/they're are all pronouns so there aren't really significant differences in their frequencies. I'm no phonologist, but it seems like differences in sound would be due more to what role the word is playing in the sentence than anything about the word itself.

[Thecard]

I'll be honest, I don't see what you're talking about Mack.  We all say things differently, slight emphasis on the "wrong" part of a word isn't really something to correct someone on.

[Telgin]

I wouldn't trust myself to interpret the spelling of a homophone by hearing it, except in context.  Of course it should always be clear which version of they're/there/their is being used by context, so I automatically assume that the speaker is using the right one.

When speaking myself, I most certainly do make a distinction though.  They're gets pronounced as they-er instead of there, and you're gets pronounced as you-er instead of yor.

I'd never assume that others do this though.  Pronunciation is screwy enough as it stands.

[Thecard]

I wouldn't trust myself to interpret the spelling of a homophone by hearing it, except in context.  Of course it should always be clear which version of they're/there/their is being used by context, so I automatically assume that the speaker is using the right one.

I don't think the way people talk and the way they write (and spell) can really be thought of as the same thing. 

When speaking myself, I most certainly do make a distinction though.  They're gets pronounced as they-er instead of there, and you're gets pronounced as you-er instead of yor.

I'd never assume that others do this though.  Pronunciation is screwy enough as it stands.

Yeah, my pronunciation... it... uh... it's not how I write.  Well, except for the contractions.  I use those with basically every word.
But... as someone who physically can't form "r" sounds... I don't like someone judging what I'm saying to be correct or not. 
Man, you would not believe how hard it is for me to get a small tub of Ranch Dressing at Wendy's.

Also, mainly due to local speech, I have a tendency to drop my "-ing" sounds.
And... my "d" sound is like a "j" sound.  So does my "ch" sound.
And my "s" has a heavy lisp attached to it.  I drop it a lot more often than I 'ought.

So I'm fucked, is what I'm saying here.

[fqllve]

Yeah we all have slight differences in the way we pronounce things. Especially if you've moved you're going to hear a lot of people who say things quite differently from you. Plus, speech is spontaneous so there're all kinds of pronunciation errors that happen. Sometimes I say the completely wrong vowel, mess up word order, combine two words into one, leave out words, etc, etc, etc. I think speech requires a great degree of leniency in correction.

Then again, I don't correct anyone on anything really, unless it's a massive error. Sometimes I even make they're/there/their errors. Mostly when I'm tired and not paying attention. So I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt unless I can't understand what they're saying.

As for their/they're/there. I'm a lazy speaker, so emphasizing the contraction part makes saying it take too long. I say all three so fast that you couldn't possibly hear a difference.