Fewer . . . .

I agree that reading is one clear solution to the bad-spelling problem. I have a couple of friends who never really took English classes until high school, by which point you're expected to have learned practically all of grammar, and they're both voracious readers who are therefore good at both spelling and grammar. It's not a universal solution, of course--my dyslexic sister and my dyslexic boyfriend, etc.--but it's a start.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I am not a native speaker (hence my eternal trouble with "less" and "fewer"), so that wouldn't prove anything. However, I had never noticed there was a difference.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I assure you nobody could tell that [judging by your writing]. Kudos.

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"Shut up and calculate" R. Feynman

Thank you!

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

The mnemonic (which would lose its heritage in simplified spelling!) that I use is "less money, fewer dollars." In other words, if you can quantify it, it's "fewer"; if you can't, it's "less." "Less filling" is right; "less calories" is wrong.

Edit: I can't tell by your writing that you aren't a native speaker, either. Being a non-native speaker gives you my Special Spelling Dispensation!

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I could. A native speaker would never write something like, "I am not a native speaker."

Yup, which is why those signs in the grocery stores that say, "Express Lane - 12 Items or Less" are grammatically incorrect. "12 Items or Fewer," thank you very much.

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2008 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

Some people can spell well and some people can't. I find that generally people who can spell in their native language spell well in English and people who can't get spell or get their kanji straight in their own language can't spell well in English. There appears to be a lot of variation in personal ability. I would imagine that a fair bit of the variation is genetic. While I always encouraged my students to improve their spelling, I never expected perfection from the majority of them.

FULL DISCLOSURE: My spelling and grammar in all languages pretty much sucks.

The Chaos that is English.

(Scroll down to the poem.)

I have spent my whole life (other than short vacations) in Colorado, and there is next to no distinction to me between those examples you posted. There are very minor variations, but nothing significant, and the variations are just as large within groups as between them, so overall, the distinction is not obvious or even existant to me.

Can anyone else see an obvious distinction there?
Is it a specific accent or dialect that creates it?
Do I just have odd pronunciation?

Well, I can't speak to your pronunciation, having never heard you speak, but I don't hear an obvious difference, either.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

That would be "suck," as your verb needs to agree with the plurality of the subject.

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"It's turtles all the way down."

I hear a pretty big difference. Probably, if someone rhymed those words in a poem, I'd think, "what an awful poem." Say the phrase "ride your bike," aloud. The first word is much longer than the third word. It's reminiscent of the vowel-doubling (for lack of a better term) in Japanese, where some syllables are drawn out about twice as long as the normal length. Of course, they spell their words with the added vowel sounds, so it's quite explicit.

Certainly, "ice" and "eyes" don't rhyme, do they? Nor do "lies" and "lice," even if you don't pronounce the "s" like a "z."

It seems to me that the English version of doubling depends to a large extent upon the consonant sound that follows the vowel sound. For instance, "ik" tends to be a short sound. Pike, hike, like. All short sounds. The "im" sound, however, tends to be longer. Time, rhyme, mime. The "id" sound is long. Hide, tide, chloride.

This would be worth looking into in more depth, I think. Maybe we can come up with a general rule.

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"It's turtles all the way down."

It's acceptable in Australia. Don't know about BAUT, however.

I don't think something as subtle as that would be in the IPA. The IPA actually isn't very specific in a lot of ways. Also, I'm pretty sure that the sound you're talking about is a diphthong anyway, and so wouldn't have its own IPA character. It would be [ai] anyway. And I think the difference is probably because in one case it's in front of a voiceless consonant and in the other it's voiced. But that's just a guess. In any case, you can find lots written about it if you google for "diphthong raising"!

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As above, so below

Are you talking about ice and eyes?

I can hear a very big difference. The opening diphthong is prolonged in eyes but curtailed in ice (the quality is the same, though). The closing consonant is voiced in eyes and unvoiced in ice.

In IPA:
ice = [ais]
eyes = [ai:z]


[Edit: typo]

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- Learn a lot teaching others.

Horrible idea.

I hate the short spelling people use on msn, and in text messages. My carier sends me them- and uses "u" "gr8" "2" etc... Drives me mental when a computer is trying to be hip with me.

Love the metric system though.

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If this writing is blue you're going too fast!

They sound the same or different to me depending on the speaker and their mood. Not relevant anyway because vowel durration is not meaningful in English like it is in Japanese, where there is a big difference between komon (advisor) and koumon (anus). -the "u" is unvoiced/silent and indicates that you should hold the "o" sound for an extra count.

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Sue ikki
mi hatenu yume no
hotsure kana---Choko
(This final scene, I
I will not see to the end.
My dream is fraying.)

Not so much quantifiable as discrete. One of my college instructors once told me I should change my "less than two months" to "fewer than two months." I replied, "That would be one month." She conceded the point.

I would argue that "less calories" is perfectly okay, since calories don't come in integral units.

Likewise, if it were possible to have fractional items at the grocery store checkout, then all those signs would be correct.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

ME: The signs should say fewer items, not less items.

FOREIGN FRIEND: And who am I going to believe? The supermarket, or a lying bastard like you?