3 ms·
OT: I've noticed recently Americans more frequently interchange "then" and "than". Is this some sort of emerging dialectical shift?
by dools 16y ago
OT: I've noticed recently Americans more frequently interchange "then" and "than". Is this some sort of emerging dialectical shift?
- yan 16y agoNo, you've just been noticing spelling mistakes and making generalizations.
- gruseom 16y agoActually, dools is quite correct. Generalizing from spelling mistakes is a classic technique for tracing phonetic shifts in language. That's because misspelling is almost always in favor of something that sounds the same (e.g. their/there/they're). One couldn't ask for a better example than "then/than". When I read the previous sentence out loud, the first "than" sounds closer to "then" than to the second "than".
- waqf 16y agoUnlike us Commonwegians, (some) Americans pronounce them identically. Hence they're more likely to interchange them in writing, either if they really can't spell or if they're half-asleep.
- sthatipamala 16y agoI have an American accent and pronounce the two words similarly (almost identically). So it is somewhat easy to mix the two when spelling them.