3 ms·

Whenever I've read material from the '60s or '70s, I've often noticed that phonetic misspellings were much more common in print in that time period than they ar

Whenever I've read material from the '60s or '70s, I've often noticed that phonetic misspellings were much more common in print in that time period than they are today. I always thought this was because it was much more tedious to check spelling before word processing software became common. Typos on internet forums notwithstanding, I might even guess the age of auto-correct, spell check, and, even things like how some OSs put squiggles over misspelled words in every text field (I think Mac was the first place I noticed this -- though I'm running firefox on FreeBSD and it's doing that in this edit field right now ...), has made the average literate person a better speller than that era. We get so much realtime feedback on spelling when writing on our devices, these opportunities to learn to spell, notice and correct our mistakes would not have at all been so accessible in 1969.

meowface 6y ago
Definitely. There's also probably a bit of selection bias when seeing what HN users think of it; a high percentage of users likely have (at least) decent writing skills and probably read things fairly often (even if it's just blog posts/emails/chats). If you read/write very rarely and speak very often, these kinds of misspellings may seem pretty natural. But if you write a lot - perhaps even a lot more than you speak - they may stick out like a sore thumb and your brain might flag them as highly unnatural and a potential sign of hidden meaning. (I'm probably like 99.5% writing 0.5% speaking, myself, and I bet many people reading this are, too.) Then combine it with one of the most mysterious and analyzed crime stories in US history, with a cryptic, megalomaniacal serial killer who loved to use ciphers and symbology to toy with the press, public, and police. I can definitely see why people might suspect something deeper to the spelling, but the null hypothesis always needs to be carefully considered, first. And a side note: does anyone know what the trends over the decades are like for less "hodgepodge-y" languages, like Spanish and German? They seem to have rules for pronouncing based on spelling and spelling based on pronunciation that are a lot more predictable and consistent than English's. I would guess that the popularization of spellcheck/autocorrect might be less significant for such languages, though I'd also love to be proven wrong.
- asveikau 6y ago
  > And a side note: does anyone know what the trends over the decades are like for less "hodgepodge-y" languages, like Spanish and German? I'm an amateur observer of this, but speaking in centuries rather than decades I can tell you that Old Spanish up until a little bit after the time of Columbus had different phonetics for several consonants, and thus different spelling. eg. There was a /ʃ/ sound spelled with X, as well as a /ʒ/ which was spelled with J or GI, GE -- this all merged and is today spelt with J or GI, GE, pronounced [x]. Also what is today /θ/ in Spain was once distinct /ts/ and /dz/, written as ç and z respectively (today c and z). /b/ and /v/ had not yet merged and their spellings have since been sort of "re-based" to look like their Latin roots. <h> for a time was not silent, and many words that start with <h> used to have an /f/. So, the interesting thing about this relative to English: when pronunciation changed around 1500, they also updated the spelling.
  - bernawil 6y ago
    > <h> for a time was not silent, and many words that start with <h> used to have an /f/. Probably related, most words with an H in Spanish use an F in Portuguese. Like 'HONGO' - > 'FUNGO'. In the 17th century there was a concerned effort to make the written language consistent in writing.
    - asveikau 6y ago
      Yes, and go further back and those words in Latin all have f. Eg. hongo from fungus. hacer from facere. hijo, hoja from filius, folia (/lj/ to /x/ being another change relative to Latin). Too many other examples to list.
xenadu02 6y ago
How late was it that there was still wide disagreement or variance in spelling? Even when the printing press arrived and dictionaries were published most people who knew how to read/write outside high society, monks, scholars, etc would have used phonetic spellings or whatever spelling was used in their area for a very long time. Spellcheck has done more to freeze spelling than anything since the Dictionary. I don't know if that matters but I do find it interesting. In the past if a prominent newspaper or popular writer decided to spell a word differently it could catch on. Now the spell checker pushes back against such changes.
- asveikau 6y ago
  There are still a few where variations are excepted. I always think of "cancelled" or "labelled" which some people spell with one L near the end. Sometimes that's a question of which country, US usage, UK usage, whatever, but sometimes multiple spellings are found in either place.

meowface 6y ago

Definitely. There's also probably a bit of selection bias when seeing what HN users think of it; a high percentage of users likely have (at least) decent writing skills and probably read things fairly often (even if it's just blog posts/emails/chats). If you read/write very rarely and speak very often, these kinds of misspellings may seem pretty natural. But if you write a lot - perhaps even a lot more than you speak - they may stick out like a sore thumb and your brain might flag them as highly unnatural and a potential sign of hidden meaning. (I'm probably like 99.5% writing 0.5% speaking, myself, and I bet many people reading this are, too.) Then combine it with one of the most mysterious and analyzed crime stories in US history, with a cryptic, megalomaniacal serial killer who loved to use ciphers and symbology to toy with the press, public, and police. I can definitely see why people might suspect something deeper to the spelling, but the null hypothesis always needs to be carefully considered, first. And a side note: does anyone know what the trends over the decades are like for less "hodgepodge-y" languages, like Spanish and German? They seem to have rules for pronouncing based on spelling and spelling based on pronunciation that are a lot more predictable and consistent than English's. I would guess that the popularization of spellcheck/autocorrect might be less significant for such languages, though I'd also love to be proven wrong.

asveikau 6y ago
> And a side note: does anyone know what the trends over the decades are like for less "hodgepodge-y" languages, like Spanish and German? I'm an amateur observer of this, but speaking in centuries rather than decades I can tell you that Old Spanish up until a little bit after the time of Columbus had different phonetics for several consonants, and thus different spelling. eg. There was a /ʃ/ sound spelled with X, as well as a /ʒ/ which was spelled with J or GI, GE -- this all merged and is today spelt with J or GI, GE, pronounced [x]. Also what is today /θ/ in Spain was once distinct /ts/ and /dz/, written as ç and z respectively (today c and z). /b/ and /v/ had not yet merged and their spellings have since been sort of "re-based" to look like their Latin roots. <h> for a time was not silent, and many words that start with <h> used to have an /f/. So, the interesting thing about this relative to English: when pronunciation changed around 1500, they also updated the spelling.
- bernawil 6y ago
  > <h> for a time was not silent, and many words that start with <h> used to have an /f/. Probably related, most words with an H in Spanish use an F in Portuguese. Like 'HONGO' - > 'FUNGO'. In the 17th century there was a concerned effort to make the written language consistent in writing.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    Yes, and go further back and those words in Latin all have f. Eg. hongo from fungus. hacer from facere. hijo, hoja from filius, folia (/lj/ to /x/ being another change relative to Latin). Too many other examples to list.

xenadu02 6y ago

How late was it that there was still wide disagreement or variance in spelling? Even when the printing press arrived and dictionaries were published most people who knew how to read/write outside high society, monks, scholars, etc would have used phonetic spellings or whatever spelling was used in their area for a very long time. Spellcheck has done more to freeze spelling than anything since the Dictionary. I don't know if that matters but I do find it interesting. In the past if a prominent newspaper or popular writer decided to spell a word differently it could catch on. Now the spell checker pushes back against such changes.

asveikau 6y ago
There are still a few where variations are excepted. I always think of "cancelled" or "labelled" which some people spell with one L near the end. Sometimes that's a question of which country, US usage, UK usage, whatever, but sometimes multiple spellings are found in either place.