For example, English speakers commonly mix up your/you’re or there/their/they’re. I’m curious about similar mistakes in other languages.
In Korean we have these conjugated forms. They both sound the same:
- 나아
[](from 낫다) be/become better - 낳아
[](from 낳다) give birth (to a baby)
So when given A as an example:
(A) 감기에 걸렸어요. I got a cold.
(B) 빨리 나으세요! Hope you get better soon!
© 빨리 낳으세요! Hope you give birth soon!For some reason Koreans across all ages write C instead of B by mistake. It became a national joke at this point and some do it ironically on purpose. I used to teach Korean. Imagine my face every time.
There are more but I’m on my phone. Will do more later.
the laguage is evolving, don’t stop it grow
- 나아
Less. It’s used eveywhere, although should only be used with uncountable nouns.
Less drama is prefered.
Fewer items left on the shopping list.
There’s a certain level of irony in correcting people’s language while not reading the original question properly yourself.
Muphry’s law in action.
:D unbeliebable. My bad.
yeah, fewer drama is prefered from them
There’s a certain level of irony in correcting someone for misreading the prompt when you’ve misread it yourself.
Two false assumptions you’ve made here:
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That English speakers are incapable of speaking other languages
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That the word ‘native’ can’t refer to English speakers
As an example, someone who speaks English and Spanish is qualified to answer this question. The word ‘native’ is ambiguous and can refer to either native English or Spanish speakers. This person can answer the prompt completely in English and still be correct.
-
Ignoring the fact that OP was asking about non-English mistakes: the less/fewer distinction isn’t something that grew naturally. Some people writing down their opinions on grammar decided that the words indicate countable versus uncountable nouns, but that distinction wasn’t present in the language many people actually spoke. The first time someone made the distinction was in a comment about the author’s linguistical style preference rather than as a rule.
The entire thing is an invented construct taught in schools that doesn’t reflect how people use the language. Linguistic prescriptivism is ridiculous and grammar (and preferably spelling, though that ship has sailed for English) should reflect how people use the language rather than be limited by the opinions and rules of the people writing the dictionaries and text books.
I’ve never heard “I need at fewest three eggs” despite its supposed grammatical correctness. It’s been centuries and still we try to hammer the less/fewer distinction into kids, it’s time to give up and accept either already.
Thank you! I often feel the urge to use “less” before a countable noun despite knowing that I’m supposed to use “fewer.” Good to know that it isn’t just me.
I see your point, but my personal view is that I like order. I don’t even care too much about specific kind of order. Chaotic-looking things can also be in-order (my favourite example is Vietnamese traffic).
I would argue
at leastis not equal tothe least. It’s a different word, despite being spelt the same. There are a few examples like that which, unfortunately, escape me at the moment.Also, don’t mean any offence, but text is difficult to relay that - I’ve literally loled at you mispelling
grammarin the sentence talking about grammar and spelling :DAt least and the least both use the same “least”. The context of their use mag be different, but if we’re sticking to strict grammar as written down by the booke, they’re both superlatives of “little”. The usage of less and least changed a bit when English dropped a bunch of grammatical cases over the years (“less of words” became “less words” because of this) but the word hasn’t changed much other than that the spelling got reformed a few hundred years ago to match pronunciation more closely.
I swear to god autocorrect is trying its bery hardest to turn grammar into grammer and I have no idea why. I’ve explicitly told it not to suggest grammer again but it keeps trying to incorrectly correct me. I blame AI.
I’m Spanish, n and ñ are different letters. They are not substitutes. It is the difference between someone being 5 years old and someone having 5 anuses.
“Yo tengo 5 años / yo tengo 5 anos”
Looking at you, Will Shortz
I am guilty of doing that but only because my computer keyboard doesn’t have an ñ.
Liar you just used it. Just admit you don’t like ñ’s dope haircut.
I’m not on my computer. My phone keyboard does all sorts of fun crazy things; some of them are even intentional.
or configure your keyboard as English international, dead tildes. You can use ~ with an n to produce an ñ. At least in gnu/Linux that’s easy to do
For people on Linux, hit [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[u] then type [0] [0] [f] [1]. That will enter an ñ when you hit the next key.
For people on Linux, enable the compose key in your keyboard settings and then type [Compose] [n] [~].
The compose-key method for entering accented letters is by far the easiest to use for any desktop OS … but it’s not enabled by default because you have to give up some modifier key to use it.
It’s completely off-topic but Compose is amazing. Specially as you can actually customise it for your usage, with a .XCompose file. For me it’s the only think that makes phonetic transcription flow, otherwise you got to shift layouts back and forth to write something like “[tɾɐ̃skɾi’sɜ̃ʊ̯] ⟨transcrição⟩”.
Based solely off this comment, I just wanna say you seem like such a cool person. Anyone who has a custom file on their OS to facilitate using IPA characters is good people in my book.
I never knew that there was such a key! Thank you! It’s really useful.
Use double n, that’s the archaic way of spelling that (tilde derives from n on top of another n)
In Spanish, we have these words:
hay (there is) ahí (over there) ay (ouch)
And it’s infuriating when people can’t pick the right one in writing.
haber / a ver
Confusing between
hay‐ayis at least understandable (forgetting the letter). Confusing betweenhay-ahíis what makes my blood boil.Portuguese also shows something similar, but the words being confused are different:
há(there is) vs.a(the) vs.à(to the).The one that @[email protected] mentioned is practically identical though -
haver(there be, have) vs. a ver (to see).This sounds like the same problem as English their/there/they’re.
Eh
I know you’re asking for such errors in other languages, but I find it interesting that some of the common english errors are more frequent with native english speakers than with learners of english as a second language.
A good example of that is using “of” instead of “have”.
Should of… of what?? It makes no sense to me how someone could confuse the two.Having learned english as a second language, I learned to read and write it before learning to speak it.
On the other hand, I’d expect native speakers to have learned spoken english before learning written english.
I think this difference changes which errors someone is likely to make.
Native speakers confuse of/have more because they heard it long before writing it.
People who learned it later are less likely to make that mistake, although they’re more likely for some others.TL;DR: Native speakers are more likely to make mistakes that are homonyms. Of/have, your/you’re, etc.
As for the spirit of your question, I’ll go with french.
Almost every noun in french is gendered.
Objects, body parts, concepts, ideas, pretty much anything and everything is gendered.
It’s also super obvious whenever someone doesn’t use the correct gender for anything.
It’s also hard to explain to anyone.
There might be a logic behind it, but I don’t know how to summarize any of it.
I just know it, but couldn’t tell you why.Some of those make no fucking sense either.
It has mostly nothing to do with women or men or gebder roles and identity, it just is.
“Jam” is a feminine noun, yet “butter” is masculine.
“Bread” is masculine, but a “loaf” is feminine.
The noun for each and every season are masculine nouns, but the word “season” itself is a feminine noun.
Also, a “vagina” is a masculine noun, because reasons? Weird.
Various different words for “testicles” vary between masculine and feminine.It’s all super obvious to anyone who speaks french, but I never managed to explain it to any speaker of a non-gendered language like english without breaking their minds.
Regarding should have and should ‘of’; I’ve always understood it to be should’ve, which when spoken tends to keep a short vowel sound in the middle of the contraction that makes it phonetically sound like ‘of’. Bit of a bone-apple-tea.
Yea it’s not even pronounced the same.
I just noticed native speakers confuse those more.
Meanwhile non-native speakers make other kinds of errors more.I disagree, “should’ve” and “should of” sound virtually identical when spoken (at least in some regions, can’t speak for all pronunciations). I can imagine why a non english native speaker would have trouble with this, though I’m not disagreeing with it being a common issue amongst native speakers as well.
Should I continue to persist after I have cut this olive in twain, and one of the portions thereof in twain again, then I’ll live, I’ll have half an olive, and I’ll’ve halved half an olive.
This is how I’ve always understood it as well. The two spellings are homophones so it’s a pretty easy mistake to make.
I’ve been told that to start a fight in Francophones, just demand to know whether grapefruit ( pamplemousse, iirc ), is male or female…
: P
The book “The Alphabet Versus The Goddess” by Leonard Shlain, makes the point that women’s-rights simply don’t progress as quickly, in countries which have gendered languages…
So, Anglo cultures pushed women’s-rights, whereas Latin cultures … won’t, don’t, drag their heels, etc…
That book is now a couple ?decades? old?
It’s still true.
Conditioning an entire population’s System-1 ( Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”, the System-1 is the default-instinct & the trained-now-automatic-expertise system, it also is the system that is both addiction & prejudice ) into gendering everything, automatically, may well prevent equal-validity from ever having place…
Mind you, I now want to see which Nordic/Scandi languages are gendered, & which Middle-East languages are gendered, to see if that holds in those parts of the world, not just in the Americas…
… digging …
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender
( that isn’t a quick read… may come back to it some day… )
Bingo!
“The grammatical gender of nouns is one of two: a noun may be masculine or it may be feminine, and there is no neutral option. Moreover, masculinity is the default grammatical gender in Arabic and a word does not have to have anything special in order to reflect this. Femininity, on the other hand, is not default and a noun would have to have something special to reflect this gender in Arabic.”
from
https://www.learnarabiconline.com/gender/
So, there is ZERO hope of equal-validity in Arabic culture, because the language programs Arabic people’s System-1 into 2 exclusive validity-categories, with male being inherently more-valid, by established language-habit.
What about Hebrew?
No wonder women can’t get equal-validity in Jewish culture…
( I read a Jewess’s writing ~ Nobody EVERY celebrated the birth of a Jewish girl: only boys are celebrated ~ … which explains the damage in the stereotypical “Jewish mother”, a woman whose validity has been contempted by all in her culture, until the damage is her most defining feature… )
So, it looks like equal-rights/equal-validity for women is … baseless, in some/many cultures…
Interesting, but depressing.
: \
So, there is ZERO hope of equal-validity in Arabic culture, because the language programs Arabic people’s System-1 into 2 exclusive validity-categories, with male being inherently more-valid, by established language-habit.
That sounds like some Strong Sapir-Whorf thinking. And the Strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is pretty roundly rejected by most linguists.
So, Anglo cultures pushed women’s-rights, whereas Latin cultures … won’t, don’t, drag their heels, etc…
That’s mostly bullshit imo.
Grammar itself doesn’t necessarily hold back progress with gender identities and equality.
Languages evolve.
French can have gender neutral pronouns, which can make sense for referring to people of various gender identities.
Meanwhile, a gender neutral “table” is a bit moot. While a table is a feminine noun, such an object has no identity, its “gender” has nothing with social constructs, with gender roles or identities, not with women in general. A noun isn’t feminine or masculine because of its characteristics, but because of its phonetics and in some cases, plain old habit.
Synonyms can have different grammatical genders.I’m quite certain that women are better off living in France or in French Canada than most places in the anglo US, not that it’s a high bar on the subject of women rights.
Due to Linguistics I spend more time trying to analyse the feature than judging it.
That said, two things that grind my gears, when it comes to Portuguese:
- Usage of the gerund for the future tense; e.g. *estaremos enviando (roughly, “we will send”) instead of “vamos enviar” or “enviaremos”. My issue here is not grammatical, but that this construction usually marks lack of commitment.
- “Cuspido e escarrado” (spat and coughed up) to highlight the striking resemblance between two things or people. When the saying is supposed to be “esculpido em Carrara” (sculpted in Carrara).
Wait, the resemblance thing is also used in other languages: “spitting image” in English, for example, and “copia sputata” in Italian. I’m actually wondering for the first time where it comes from, so maybe there’s a reason for the Portuguese saying to be related to spit
Excellent comment. I’ve tried to look this up, but no dice… Anyone have insights?
I think that there is some semantic association between spitting and copying, that all three languages are using. (I wonder how modern it is; photocopy machines spitting copies come to my mind.)
However in Portuguese it might be also because most people don’t know the reference of the original saying (the marble sculptures of that Tuscan city), so they parse it as a phonetically similar saying. And in quick speech they do sound similar, e.g. for me:
- esculpido em Carrara - [(e)skʊ(w).'pi.dẽ.kɐ̥.'hä.ɾɐ]
- [cópia] cuspida e escarrada - [kʊs.'pi.des.kɐ̥.'hä.dɐ]
From a quick search that didn’t provide anything really insightful, it seems that at least in Italian the term has been used since the XIV century, so it’s not photocopy related
Yeah, if copia sputata is so old there’s no way that it’s from those machines.
Digging further on the expression it seems to be old in English too, attested in 1689. And the only explanation that I’ve seen to account to Italian and English both having it is religious in nature - while not biblical it seems common the idea that God spat into the clay to create Adam.
Speaking on Italian: people (often native speakers) messing with the apostrophe bug me a bit, it’s a good example for this thread. Specially un’ followed by a masculine word; e.g. *un’altro for un altro. It tilts the autocompletion inside my brain, expecting a word and getting another in place. I’m not native speaker though so this likely plays a role.
Oh trust me, it happens a lot even between native speakers, and it irks me too haha
Good points overall! I’d add that in my opinion “estaremos enviando” is closer to “we will be sending”, which also better conveys the odd, misplaced telemarketer politeness vibes it carries.
we will be sending
This. I was struggling to convey the aspect, but you got it right IMO. And, pragmatically, it’s more like “we might be sending”, with that might highlighting that it probably won’t.
Is ‘estaremos enviando’ not just Brazilian Portuguese?
I believe that it’s more used in dialects spoken in Brazil than elsewhere, but even in Brazil it’s considered poor grammar. Specially given that both nós conjugations¹ and the synthetic future² are falling into disuse, so it sounds like trying to speak fancy and failing hard at it.
EDIT: now it clicked me why you likely said so; it’s common in European dialects to use “a enviar” (gerundive infinitive) instead of “enviando” (traditional gerund)³. The phenomenon that I’m talking about can be used with either, e.g. “estaremos a enviar”; for me it’s the same issue, people would say “estaremos a enviar” instead of “enviaremos” to throw the event into a distant future that might never happen.
- They’re still fairly used by older people in speech, but there’s a clear gen gap with younger folks using “a gente” almost exclusively.
- almost completely replaced by conjugated ir + infinitive.
- Note that “enviando” is still fairly used in Alentejo and the Algarve.
I’m a native French speaker, specifically from the Acadian parts of the province of New-Brunswick (Canada). We have a lot of vocabulary, grammar and syntax that people who speak a more standard French might frown upon (lots of borrowing from English but also a lot of old French words which disappeared in Europe but not here, as well as some Indigenous influences). Fuck anyone who judges our dialect and accents, I love the way we speak.
That being said, there are a few things that bother me:
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The pleonasm “plus pire” (most worst, or most most bad). There are a few common pleonasm but this one is the only one that truly irks me for some reason.
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“Si que” (if that) because of something that was drilled into me by my dad, “les si n’aiment pas les que” (“the ifs don’t like the thats”). Using “si que” is like saying “if that I say this” rather than “if I say this”.
The more I think about it the more I guess my stance on this is that deviating from standard French is fine and even cool when it adds meaning or nuance. I just dislike it when it’s purely redundant.
In France there are some mistakes that became social markers.
People following conspiracy theories are mostly bad educated people, and they wrongly conjugate some verbs.
The most common examples are:
- “Nous sachons”, instead of “Nous savons” (we know)
- “Ils croivent” instead of “Ils croient” (they think, they believe)
- “Comme même” instead of “Quand même” (nonetheless, despite, kinda hard to translate)
Making one of those mistakes will immediately tag you as a fool.
Interesting, in Quebec I’ve never heard the conjugations to the left!
When we need to strategically indicate this kind of thing, we just curse excessively. Often they are strung together into a profane litany that continues on for some time! I always thought it was quite artful.
Like Saigonauticon, I’ve never heard any of these!
In my neck of the woods you’ll find people adding a first person plural ending to third person plural verbs (ex: “elles mangeons” instead of “elles mangent”) which is common enough to not bother me or strike me as a sign of stupidity, and at least differenciates between the singular and plural forms of a verb.
One thing I didn’t mention in my original comment that does bother me is something kinda similar some people do with the verb “être”, like a teacher I had in high school. Instead of “ils étaient”, she’d say “ils sontaient”, simply adding the typical imparfait conjugation ending to the present “ils sont”.
Les cours avec elle sontaient un peu tristes, et malheureusement assez représentatifs de la qualité de mon enseignement.
So is it like saying “si que le jet est un 20 natural” instead of “si le jet est un 20 natural”? Just adding the word “que” in there without reason? Or does it only happen in certain contexts?
I’m not a linguist, and studies about the French in my region are few and far between, so I’m not comfortable stating anything as fact. However, as far as I can tell, it’s not context-dependant and never adds any meaning.
-
In German people tend to increase “only” (das einzige). As in, they say something is the “onliest” (das einzigste). It’s usually a good indicator of someone’s education.
In many regions it is common to do comparisons with “as” (wie). As in “My dog is bigger as yours” instead of “My dog is bigger than yours”. The most infuriating thing about this is that most people doing that mistake don’t even acknowledge that it is one. At least people who say “onliest” can be convinced that it is wrong.
Technically not an error but still annoying is to append an apostrophe and an s to a name to indicate the genitive. Like in “Anna’s food is good”. In German that should be written as “Annas Essen ist gut”. But due to many people making the same mistake (I guess also because we’re used to it from English sentences) it has been allowed to use an apostrophe. So in that case I’m just a grumpy old guy.
I opened the thread to see if someone already posted this. Glad I’m not the onliest german to be annoyed by this.
In Dutch it’s also common to use als (as) instead of dan (than). Technically it’s wrong though.
This gets really confusing if you’re from Limburg. In Limburgish, “daan” (the cognate to Dutch “dan”) only exists as the time indicator. With comparisons the correct Limburgish is to use “es” for differences (e.g. “Jan is groeter es Maria”, “John is bigger than Mary”), and “wie” for equivalents (e.g “Jan is eve aajd wie Maria”, “John is as old as Mary”). Now “es” is cognate to Dutch “als”, but using it in Dutch as in Limburgish is wrong. So yeah this gets confusing.
In many regions it is common to do comparisons with “as” (wie). As in “My dog is bigger as yours” instead of “My dog is bigger than yours”.
I’m (re-)learning Yiddish at the moment, and “as (wie)” is a common construction; it’s interesting to see which words and sentence formats are common (between German and Yiddish), and which aren’t. I wonder if that’s where this usage comes from.
Nice, very interesting find.
Also, I’ve never been called a Grammar Nazi more elegantly.
I never meant to say or imply that you were and I apologise most humbly if it came through that way. I just thought that it was interesting.
There are many examples of incorrectly placed apostrophes in German here:
http://www.deppenapostroph.info/Another mistake in the German language is the incorrect separation of compound words. An extreme example would be Brotaufstrich (spread/parfait) as Brot auf Strich (bread on line).
Additional examples in German are here:
http://www.deppenleerzeichen.info/Technically not an error but still annoying is to append an apostrophe and an s to a name to indicate the genitive.
Even technically I’d consider it an error - the genitive/“possessive” apostrophe in English highlights that you’re dealing with a clitic, attached to the end of the noun phrase; e.g. the dog**'s** food` → the dog and the cat**'s** food. In German however it doesn’t behave like a clitic, it’s a plain declension; e.g. das Futter des Hundes → das Futter des Hundes und der Katze - you’re switching words, not moving them.
I wonder if that’s because most people nowadays use von+Dative instead.
Oh god before i read your comment i thought i have nothing to add. Then i realised that i know people who say things like: als wie. Mein hund ist grösser als wie deiner.
I am a non-native speaker of Vietnamese. There are some pretty horrible mistakes you can make, honestly. I’ll go through a few of them.
In Vietnamese, non-native speakers often confuse the word for ‘mother in law’ with the word for the male genitalia.
Also the word for “large” with the word for the female genitalia. So when ordering e.g. a large meal, if in doubt, just use the word for L (“luh”) instead of lớn.
When referring to your mother-in-law, practice with your partner before the first meeting. Then, quickly ask for permission to call her “mother”, which is easier for non-native speakers to pronounce.
Finally, the word for ‘martial arts’ and ‘Vietnamese wife’ differs only by a single tone. If you make the mistakes above, you may perhaps find out why that is – usually via the medium of a flung sandal :P
In Romanian we have an “i” situation.
One kid = un copil Two kids = doi copii The kids = copiii (the article goes at the end of the noun)
To be = a fi (You) be nice = fii cuminte
It can be confusing, but the amount of people that are eating the ending "i"s is infuriating.
In Swedish people often confuse de/dem(they/them kind of) and I honestly don’t know exactly when to differentiate. You often learn to replace the word with another like vi/oss(we/us) to see if the sentence still sounds good and then you know the form you should use
De/dem is simply the subject form and the object form of the same word, they and them respectively. The reason for the common confusion surrounding the use of these, as it might not be quite clear to a non-swedish speaker, is that both of them are pronounced in the same way nowadays: “dom”. As the comment above suggests, just using another subject/object pronoun such as vi/oss (we/us) usually works as they are clearly pronounced in different ways and therefore gets more automatically correct.
Why the words for they/them have evolved to both sound the same and not really that close to how either of them are written I do not know, but the wrong use in text annoys me quite a lot. Personally, I’m all for ditching the differentiation and just default to always writing “dom” as that better reflects the spoken language.
On another tangent, Swedes also often “särskriver” - write two words apart when they should be put together. A fun example of that that I’ve seen is “kassa personal” (~crappy staff) which really should be “kassapersonal” (checkout staff).
And even worse, using personal pronouns exclusively in subject form, e.g. “till han” (“to he”) instead of in object form where suitable, e.g. “till honom” (“to him”).
my go to for remembering which one to use is translating the sentence to english and if “the” or “they” is correct use “de” and if “them” is correct use “dem” (remember by thinking dem = them)
In Thai folks stopped saying -ร -ล clusters outside of educated/business settings & has led to spelling errors popping up everywhere. An example: กร- is a common start to words, but the most popular dish, กะเพรา (ga-prao), is seen as กระเพรา, กระเพา, or even กะเพา.
Lithuanian here.
What mostly grinds my gears is Lithuanians taking an English word and adding a Lithuanian ending, and often even a wrong one:
breakupinosi instead of išsiskyrė, faitinosi instead of mušėsi , etc.
Some other gripes include optimaliausias i.e. most optimal. Optimal is already the best, what is the point of saying bestest?
Adding pointless phrases like ta prasme i.e. in that meaning is also common but seen as a major style error.
As a French speaker, I’m not mad at foreigners for not speaking French. I’m very tolerant for all their mistakes and I will help them if they want to.
I’m mad at French speakers mistakes though. Like people mixing first person futur and imparfait. Or people saying digital instead of numérique (those ones I hate them).
Like people mixing first person futur and imparfait.
Just to clarify, do you mean stuff like saying “je serais là demain” (“I would be there tomorrow”) rather than “je serai là demain”? (“I will be there tomorrow”)?
Yes indeed. The mistake comes from mispronunciation : je serai was originally pronounced “Je seré”. But parisiens especially and in many other places they started to pronounce “Je serè” exactly like the imparfait. So now they can’t make the difference. What’s funny is that they always invert both, the error is made for both in like 80% of the cases. I find this properly fascinating.
I think this is common to most languages: English speakers lecturing native speakers about how they’re grammatically incorrect based on some rule printed in an entry-level language textbook.
I once saw a white dude confidently assert to a Japanese person that 全然 could not be used in the positive and only in the negative. Dude wouldn’t even back down after the Japanese speaker got out their phone and showed him a famous 12th century (or something) poem that used 全然 in the affirmative. That’s like trying to correct someone’s grammar and then getting shut down by Shakespeare.
