When you learn English mainly from written sources with little speaking practice (and I was an extreme example of that), you end up composing written English sentences in your head and reading them aloud when speaking (or just writing them down directly when typing). This makes your pronunciation awful and your speaking stilted and unnatural, but on the other hand, your mind categorizes differently spelled homophones as completely different entities, so there is almost zero chance of mixing them up.
In contrast, if you’re a native speaker or otherwise a truly fluent speaker, you compose natural spoken English in your head and, so to say, dictate it to yourself when writing. This makes it easy to confuse homophones, since your mind emits words encoded as audial, not textual information, and you have to disambiguate spelling on the fly based on the context.
This is of course a simplified picture, but still a more or less correct one in my experience. And as your spoken English gets better, you start gradually moving from the first category to the second.
Yes, this seems plausible, and it gives a fascinating insight, for me, into how other people process language. I’ve been noticing lately how frequent wrong homophones are in writing; in fact I just encountered one—are for our—in a textbook I’m currently working through (Lawvere & Schanuel’s Conceptual Mathematics). This is a type of mistake I can’t imagine myself making. But if, for many people, the textual encoding is not maintained, in parallel with the audial, when spoken competence increases past some threshold, the phenomenon is explained.
I don’t think it’s a very pressing concern. Spelling errors impede understanding very rarely, and they don’t lower your status as long as they plausibly look accidental.
Here’s another related example I found fascinating. It was only recently that I realized that “rose” in its two different meanings (the flower and the past tense of “rise”) is in fact pronounced the same by native speakers. Yet I somehow managed to register these pronunciations as totally different. When I introspected about it, I realized that my mind had them stored separately with a phonemic tonal contrast of a sort that doesn’t exist in English at all but is common in my native language; I was even pronouncing them in this tonal way. God knows how many such things are still coloring my accent when speaking English.
I don’t think anyone would perceive this as wrong, though. I might also note that there are many english words which are exact homophones in some dialects but not others (although all the ones I can think of at the moment are spelled differently). And I’d have to say I feel as though my mind has the two homonyms ‘rose’ and ‘rose’ stored separately even though they happen to have the same spelling and pronunciation.
Spelling errors impede understanding very rarely,
They always impede my understanding; not because I have trouble figuring out what was meant, but because they distract me. It’s not clear to me that this is something I should want to change about myself, but even if it were, I doubt that I could change it without what I would consider unacceptable collateral damage, or possibly even at all.
and they don’t lower your status as long as they plausibly look accidental.
Well, the world is full of assholes like me who do have a tendency to take status away from those who make spelling and grammar mistakes, especially if they don’t have some obvious excuse like being a non-native speaker. Most of us are probably more self-righteous about it than I am.
And I’d have to say I feel as though my mind has the two homonyms ‘rose’ and ‘rose’ stored separately even though they happen to have the same spelling and pronunciation.
I seem to have them stored separately too. It took me rather a while to even work out what the second version was having already resolved a first.
Well, the world is full of assholes like me who do have a tendency to take status away from those who make spelling and grammar mistakes, especially if they don’t have some obvious excuse like being a non-native speaker. Most of us are probably more self-righteous about it than I am.
Unfortunately for you in most places that will backfire against all but targets that already have low status.
Unfortunately for you in most places that will backfire against all but targets that already have low status.
I guess it’s a good thing you said this, because it shows me that I’m using the word ‘status’ differently from you. I’m not that much of an asshole! What I mean by ‘take status away from X’ is ‘consider X to have lower status’. In other words, I understood ‘status’ to be a sort of tag I associate with particular persons in my own mind. One might, then, talk about ‘status’ as if it were actually an invariant (i.e. observer-independent) property of a person, the way ‘karma’ is an invariant property of a particular identity within an online community; but this would be understood as a sort of shorthand, an imprecise way of speaking. It would have seemed wrong to me to say instead, for example, ‘lower my estimate of the status of X’, because I do not think that X actually has a status. What should I have said?
I also suggest that you stay aware of this in conversations about social status, in general. Disagreements about whether people in groups actually have a status in the first place cause a lot of confusion, especially because (as in this case) it’s not always clear at first that a disagreement even exists, and many other things hinge on this.
Incidentally, would you also say the same things about words like “popularity” or “privilege”? That is, would you say that talking about person X as more popular than person Y is an imprecise shorthand, and that it’s wrong to talk about my estimate of X’s popularity, because X doesn’t actually have popularity?
Yeah, but then I wouldn’t be invoking the concept of ‘status’. I was responding to the idea that spelling mistakes don’t lower someone’s status, so that’s why I ended up using the term. But of course X’s (‘actual’) status supervenes on the set of individual judgments that constitute various others’ ‘opinion of X’. So it’s only in that ‘weak’ sense that I meant my remark that X ‘doesn’t actually have a status’; viz. that (in my way of using the term) X has a status in the eyes of each of the various individuals judging X rather than a status simpliciter. X’s status, simpliciter, could then perhaps be defined as the weighted average of X’s status-in-the-eyes-of-all-the-others—weighted, perhaps, by their statuses. Or something, I dunno. Even that’s probably too simple. But of course I realise that one usually refers to status as though X simply has a status.
On the other hand, when you ask if I would say it’s wrong to talk about ‘my estimate of X’s popularity’ (which I wouldn’t), I realise that similarly I wouldn’t have a problem with talk of estimates of X’s status, if that were in fact what I wanted to refer to. So I misrepresented my own reasoning; I didn’t choose not to say ‘lower my estimate of the status of X’ because I don’t think X has an actual status, but because my estimate of the ‘actual’ status of X wasn’t what I was talking about. I did mean, as you suggest, ‘lower my opinion of X’.
Popularity, while being as vague a notion as status, does strike me as being a less complicated one; maybe that’s why I’ve developed these intuitions. But the usage of ‘popularity’ that seems most normal to me is as a function of the opinions of some whole population; although people do occasionally use the term in an individual-indexed way. That usage isn’t so popular with me, though. (And I’m not sure what to think about ‘privilege’.)
When you learn English mainly from written sources with little speaking practice (and I was an extreme example of that), you end up composing written English sentences in your head and reading them aloud when speaking (or just writing them down directly when typing). This makes your pronunciation awful and your speaking stilted and unnatural, but on the other hand, your mind categorizes differently spelled homophones as completely different entities, so there is almost zero chance of mixing them up.
In contrast, if you’re a native speaker or otherwise a truly fluent speaker, you compose natural spoken English in your head and, so to say, dictate it to yourself when writing. This makes it easy to confuse homophones, since your mind emits words encoded as audial, not textual information, and you have to disambiguate spelling on the fly based on the context.
This is of course a simplified picture, but still a more or less correct one in my experience. And as your spoken English gets better, you start gradually moving from the first category to the second.
Yes, this seems plausible, and it gives a fascinating insight, for me, into how other people process language. I’ve been noticing lately how frequent wrong homophones are in writing; in fact I just encountered one—are for our—in a textbook I’m currently working through (Lawvere & Schanuel’s Conceptual Mathematics). This is a type of mistake I can’t imagine myself making. But if, for many people, the textual encoding is not maintained, in parallel with the audial, when spoken competence increases past some threshold, the phenomenon is explained.
What can be done to help correct this bug?
I don’t think it’s a very pressing concern. Spelling errors impede understanding very rarely, and they don’t lower your status as long as they plausibly look accidental.
Here’s another related example I found fascinating. It was only recently that I realized that “rose” in its two different meanings (the flower and the past tense of “rise”) is in fact pronounced the same by native speakers. Yet I somehow managed to register these pronunciations as totally different. When I introspected about it, I realized that my mind had them stored separately with a phonemic tonal contrast of a sort that doesn’t exist in English at all but is common in my native language; I was even pronouncing them in this tonal way. God knows how many such things are still coloring my accent when speaking English.
I don’t think anyone would perceive this as wrong, though. I might also note that there are many english words which are exact homophones in some dialects but not others (although all the ones I can think of at the moment are spelled differently). And I’d have to say I feel as though my mind has the two homonyms ‘rose’ and ‘rose’ stored separately even though they happen to have the same spelling and pronunciation.
They always impede my understanding; not because I have trouble figuring out what was meant, but because they distract me. It’s not clear to me that this is something I should want to change about myself, but even if it were, I doubt that I could change it without what I would consider unacceptable collateral damage, or possibly even at all.
Well, the world is full of assholes like me who do have a tendency to take status away from those who make spelling and grammar mistakes, especially if they don’t have some obvious excuse like being a non-native speaker. Most of us are probably more self-righteous about it than I am.
I seem to have them stored separately too. It took me rather a while to even work out what the second version was having already resolved a first.
Unfortunately for you in most places that will backfire against all but targets that already have low status.
I guess it’s a good thing you said this, because it shows me that I’m using the word ‘status’ differently from you. I’m not that much of an asshole! What I mean by ‘take status away from X’ is ‘consider X to have lower status’. In other words, I understood ‘status’ to be a sort of tag I associate with particular persons in my own mind. One might, then, talk about ‘status’ as if it were actually an invariant (i.e. observer-independent) property of a person, the way ‘karma’ is an invariant property of a particular identity within an online community; but this would be understood as a sort of shorthand, an imprecise way of speaking. It would have seemed wrong to me to say instead, for example, ‘lower my estimate of the status of X’, because I do not think that X actually has a status. What should I have said?
My suggestion would be “lower my opinion of X.”
I also suggest that you stay aware of this in conversations about social status, in general. Disagreements about whether people in groups actually have a status in the first place cause a lot of confusion, especially because (as in this case) it’s not always clear at first that a disagreement even exists, and many other things hinge on this.
Incidentally, would you also say the same things about words like “popularity” or “privilege”? That is, would you say that talking about person X as more popular than person Y is an imprecise shorthand, and that it’s wrong to talk about my estimate of X’s popularity, because X doesn’t actually have popularity?
Yeah, but then I wouldn’t be invoking the concept of ‘status’. I was responding to the idea that spelling mistakes don’t lower someone’s status, so that’s why I ended up using the term. But of course X’s (‘actual’) status supervenes on the set of individual judgments that constitute various others’ ‘opinion of X’. So it’s only in that ‘weak’ sense that I meant my remark that X ‘doesn’t actually have a status’; viz. that (in my way of using the term) X has a status in the eyes of each of the various individuals judging X rather than a status simpliciter. X’s status, simpliciter, could then perhaps be defined as the weighted average of X’s status-in-the-eyes-of-all-the-others—weighted, perhaps, by their statuses. Or something, I dunno. Even that’s probably too simple. But of course I realise that one usually refers to status as though X simply has a status.
On the other hand, when you ask if I would say it’s wrong to talk about ‘my estimate of X’s popularity’ (which I wouldn’t), I realise that similarly I wouldn’t have a problem with talk of estimates of X’s status, if that were in fact what I wanted to refer to. So I misrepresented my own reasoning; I didn’t choose not to say ‘lower my estimate of the status of X’ because I don’t think X has an actual status, but because my estimate of the ‘actual’ status of X wasn’t what I was talking about. I did mean, as you suggest, ‘lower my opinion of X’.
Popularity, while being as vague a notion as status, does strike me as being a less complicated one; maybe that’s why I’ve developed these intuitions. But the usage of ‘popularity’ that seems most normal to me is as a function of the opinions of some whole population; although people do occasionally use the term in an individual-indexed way. That usage isn’t so popular with me, though. (And I’m not sure what to think about ‘privilege’.)