BecomeMe

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Social Experiment. Become Me. What I see, you see.

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Renneder

Native English speakers are the world’s worst communicators (www.bbc.com)

submitted 1 year ago by Renneder to c/becomeme

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it's the opposite. That for a lot of people, words don't really exist in any other way than as sounds.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That could work too. In both cases you get the word being formed in the spoken language, and then interfering on the spelling only afterwards. The difference is if defining the word syntactically (like I did) or phonologically (like your reasoning leads to).

[Kind of off-topic trivia, but for funzies] I've seen similar phenomena in other languages, like:

Italian - "per questo" (thus, therefore; lit. "for this") vs. *perquesto
Portuguese - "por que" (why; lit. "for what") vs. "porque" (because)

Both of our explanations would work fine for those two too, mind you; they both sound like unitary words and behave as such. (e.g. they repel syntactical intrusion).