3 ms·
Just playing devil's advocate here, but cooperate and cooper have different pronunciations, and coöperate (or co-operate) makes it absolutely clear.
by lou1306 4y ago
Just playing devil's advocate here, but cooperate and cooper have different pronunciations, and coöperate (or co-operate) makes it absolutely clear.
- bombcar 4y agoIt’s the best kind of correct - technically correct. Co-worker vs cow orker, etc.
- googlryas 4y agoI can't imagine that to be the case, because this is English...there are numerous common words that are spelled exactly the same, but pronounced differently (read, wind, wound off the top of my head). The fact that they don't give them any special treatment(diatrics or something else) makes me think the legibility is not the concern. Also, I might be wrong, but I don't think people read most words by scanning letter by letter and forming a belief as to what the word says. I personally have never misread cooperate as cooper, as far as I can recall.
- zestyping 4y agoI think it's more a question of what's easier on the reader, rather than what a reader can feasibly distinguish. Yes, words like "read", "present", "lead" have multiple prononunciations, but they have a cost; if half the words you encountered were like that, English would be very hard to read. I find "co-operate" slightly easier to read than "cooperate", at the expense of being slightly longer. These are all minor trade-offs (or is it tradeoffs?) of course; it's not a cut-and-dry (but hopefully not cutanddry) argument as to what to do in any individual case.