I just have been writing an e-mail to a business partner in England. And again something strange happened (not for the first time).

I wanted to type "a few" but my fingers ended up with typing " a view".

I know the difference between the 2 words (and yes I know the v at the beginning should sound different from the f, but as a German for me this is a little difficult).

Moreover when using hand writing this would never happen to me. It seems as if the fingers on the keyboard react directly to the "sound", ignoring the meaning.

There are a couple of more words. like wood / would, two / to

Anyone ever had the same problem? Is there a scientific name for it

Thanks for some insights
Andre

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Andre

"They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!"
Mark Twain

Yes, there is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophone

It's one of my big pet peeves.
Interestingly enough, I see this error a lot more in native speakers than in people who had to learn the language (my native language is also German).

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Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

"Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you."

yes, I type 'their' instead of 'there' and other mistakes, and I am quite aware of the difference.

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How do I correct a typo in the title? It should read phenomenon.

Thanks

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Andre

"They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!"
Mark Twain

yes exactly, thats another one.

Andre

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Andre

"They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!"
Mark Twain

Seems appropriate to the thread, though. I think you should leaf it

Phenomnom - now that's something for the http://www.bautforum.com/fun-n-games...-word-day.html thread.

(I completely missed that - I guess nobody minds that much)

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Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

"Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you."

Hmm...that is not exactly what I am aming at. It is clear that the words sound the same (so they are homophone), but why do I type the wrong word despite the fact that I know the correct one and very often immediately recognise that. I mean, it happens while I make up the sentences, not wehn typing what some one else is saying.
And why does it happen when typing, not when using hand writing?

Andre

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Andre

"They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!"
Mark Twain

LOL!

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Andre

"They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!"
Mark Twain

Interesting question.

My immediate theory (and therefore almost definitely wrong) would be that we learn specific patterns for words/sounds in a language when learning to type (with two hands) as opposed to learning to write where every letter is written in sequence. So you "hear" the sentence in your mind and your fingers automatically translate to the most common pattern, much like the T9 dictionary does in phones.

I don't think there is a word for this phenomenon around yet, but the errors it produces are definitely homophone errors.

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Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

"Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you."

Well, your theory doesn't sound that wrong to me

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Andre

"They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!"
Mark Twain

I think the word you are looking for may be "aphasia"!

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T. Anderson

Always these guys throwing words at me I have to look up in the dictionary

No, I do not think so. I have no problems in finding or understanding the word.
I know the word I want to use and I know for sure the difference between that word and the wrong one.
It is just that my fingers type the wrong one.

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Andre

"They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!"
Mark Twain

I think that that is Kaptain K's point! You know what to do but you don't do it.

Aphasia and dysphasia may be more serious afflictions, usually resulting from brain damage, but the result is similar. This could be a mild form.Careful! Your brain is trying to pin this rap on your fingers.

I know there's certian words that when I type them, they always end up wrong. The one I can think of is "actual". For some reason, when I type it, I always type "Actually" even when I'm saying "actual" in my head (yes, I speak the words I'm typing to myself in my head).

And it's not a case of using the wrong form of the word; I say, mean, and think I type "Actual"...but then when I look at the post afterwards, 9 times out of 10 it says "Actually".

It's very annoying and I don't know what triggers it, but for some reason I always type it wrong. There's a few other words... Like I always type "Amount" with 2 M's (Ammount) even though I do know how to spell it...it's like my fingers just think there should be two M's. Probably a conflict between learned language and learned repetative motion.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

Speaking and understanding a spoken language are different skills, located in different parts of our brains. Writing and reading are different still. My amateurish explanation would be that while you have a good level of English in speech and in handwriting, your proficiency in English "typing" is a little behind the others. Or perhaps it has more to do with the fact that typing is a task with lots of unconscious components. So when you're typing English your brain has a certain tendency to slide back into autopilot, and suffer interference from your "German typing" mode.

Just guessing, though. Ask a linguist.

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I mentioned my own theory in some other thread--can't remember which one, and it doesn't seem to be coming up with the Google search.

Essentially, it was that you could be typing, and anything could interrupt the train of thought, but since the brain continues to play the sound of the word in your head, you "hear" the sound and type what you hear instead of what you mean, then possibly recover your train of thought and continue (either that or notice the mistake right there).

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personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Oh. Good diagnosis for my recent case. Wait. You said "may". OK. For me, aphasia was just a temporary, so far unique, symptom of my irregularly scheduled ophthalmic migraines -- the light shows without the headache. Fascinating.

I was in the grocery when I noticed I was in somewhat of a dream-like state, unable to focus, finding it difficult to get my brain's attention -- which seemed to be more interested in repeatedly adding up some imagined column of 3-digit numbers. I also quickly recognized in the background my own typical classic opthalmic migraine symptoms -- crescent-shaped blind spot, zigzag auras, yellow color tint, so my only concern was whether the new experience was also a migraine symptom or if I had hit some loser's jackpot of having a stroke coincidentally with a migraine.

I broke through the infinite loop just enough to conclude my shopping and check out my goods, even marveling that my own brain, in its hobbled state, was able to do arithmetic and provide exact change before the register presented the total plus tax. (Great. When my higher functions fail, my brain wants to be a calculator. Something to look forward to in old age!)

I could only grunt at the checker though. I understood, but couldn't meaningfully respond except with gesture.

Outside I explored this partial disappearance of verbal skill. I found that while I could think in words, and of words, I couldn't say words out loud. Not a good feeling. I could float a word in my mind's eye, see the spelling, like PSYCHOLOGY (I found my brain wanted to experiment with long words that had unusual spellings) and wind up pronouncing it aloud like, "Blxshuurrp."

XYLOPHONE. CHARTREUSE. PARADIGM. "Broosh. Fubble. Thwath."

I jogged (what? a mere stroke wouldn't stop a runner!) home a mile thinking up random big words and muttering incoherent gibberish. And, I wondered what was the word for when you can't say a word. I ran extra-carefully, moving my blind spot frequently to make sure there wasn't a car or biker hiding in it, impressed at my heightened responsibility to take care of me while my brain was malfunctioning. It was the first migraine for me out in the world, not at safer home or work (out of maybe a dozen ever).

A few blocks from nobody-home home, I recalled "aphasia" but still couldn't say it. I thought: as soon as I get home it is very important to see if aphasia can be a migraine symptom -- or else I'd better get on the phone and tell emergency services I was stroking out... Wait. I couldn't tell anyone anything! How embarrassing.

Got home, rushed to the computer, clicked on Google -- mousing skills: OK -- and typed "aphasia migraine".

Yes! Finger output was working! Yay! I couldn't say words, but I could type them. That's good! Search complete. Indeed aphasia can be a migraine symptom. Relax. Calm down. Read all about it. Aphasia has many facets, with different areas of the brain yielding different effects. Cool. OK.

Ten minutes later the migraine light show was mostly over and my friends, the words, were suddenly at my beck and call. Checked in with the doc.

And before long I was back in BAUT. Too bad for all of you...

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...

01101001, that's a scary story! Hope everything is all right.

I almost started a thread a couple of weeks ago asking the same question as the OP: Why the heck do I keep typing homophones? There/their is the one that comes immediately to mind but there have been multiple others. I also add letters to things: "Ratio" almost always comes out as "ration". I'm an engineer so I use "ratio" frequently. I would seldom have occasion to actually mean "ration".

Anyhow, I guess I'm glad it's not just me.

For a description of the phenomenon (I typed that very carefully, and still got it wrong!) how about "distypsic"?

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And before long I was back in BAUT. Too bad for all of you...
Naw, we...or at least I...enjoy your posts.
Though I'm wondering if it was as you described, or if you're attributing your migraines to glaucoma, and the above was a result of the "medicine"...

I've noticed similar on an occasion where I was passing out...it seemed the more I lost my visual sense, the more I gained a sense of self awareness and was able to think and act much quicker than usual--almost like matrix slow-motion.

Though it's been years...any recent loss of sensory ability has been dirrectly linked to the evening's particular choice in beverage.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

LOLL

Good job. I mean putting it back the way it was
Could be a recommendation for fixing broken cars

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Most have heard of "dyslexia", which to varying degrees affects many people's ability to read. My problem is a closely related, but much rarer one called dysgraphia. I cannot write a smooth, continuous sentence without having to stop and think what the next letter should be every few letters or so. I had to give up cursive for block printing many years (decades) ago. It also affects other repetitive motions, such as music. I hear music in my head, but as soon as I pick up a guitar or sit down at a piano, it all flies away.

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Agraphia and dysgraphia are definitely the words to consider, although this sounds milder than what either of those words are normally used for. Aphasia or dysphasia is about speech using the mouth and throat and dyslexia (and alexia if there is such a thing) is (and would be) about reading. Speaking out loud and reading are two different functions that use different areas of the brain from each other and from writing.

You're not alone, Kaptain K ...
I was diagnosed in 1999 with "a severe dysgraphia" ...
in my case, it means an inability to mentally process visual information - I thought I had a memory problem (not a good thing when studying for a science degree), that's why I sought help -

I can write quite well, and I can read (and watch) with reasonable proficiency ... but I can only retain about 10% of it ... this has some benefits - I can read the same book, or watch the same movie, and not know most of it (including how it ended) by the next day ...

I wondered if my dysgraphia stemmed from having gone through primary school severely short-sighted (ie, 6/60 in one eye and 6/36 in the other) and nobody knew about it (didn't everybody see the world as a vague blur beyond their fingertips?) - I must have cheated on the school eye exams (or skipped that day - I did a lot of that) ... what an amazing discovery when I (at age 10) grabbed my mother's spectacles and tried them on - trees have leaves! tiny, sharp-edged things ... hundreds of them! I got my first pair of glasses a couple of weeks later ...

back to the OP - I don't know if there is a name for subconscious or unintentional word substitution while typing (dystypia? dystenographia?) ... only that it certainly seems common enough to warrant both a name, and a fair bit of professional study ...

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There seems to be some slop over, although some terms can be considered more specific than others. From dictionary.com, the definition of aphasia in The American Heritage^® Stedman's Medical Dictionary. Retrieved May 17, 2008: 'Course, if you're typing homophones, how would you know that you're not also speaking them?

Ah, this may be a clue to the problem we're talking about. I do the same thing with "actually", and the reason simply is that I type "actually" a lot more than "actual", and somehow it becomes a habit. Not all signals go all the way to our brain. When writing patterns I think that there is some amount of autonomy of nerves, so we remember patterns. And if you type a certain word a lot, you may end up typing that word when you want to type a similar word. I think it's very normal. There is another word that I often do that with, but I can't remember what it is.

In any case, regarding the OP, I don't think there is a term for the original query, between "a few" and "a view". I think simply that the two terms are associated in some way in your mind, and you mistake them. Sometimes that phenomenon turns into what is called a "malapropism", but I don't think that's what you're talking about.

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As above, so below

This is the most plausible explanation for native and near-native speakers IMO. In spoken language (including that which is silently, mentally spoken as we type), all of the generative transformations from meaning to syntax to phonetic representation occur well before the words are transcribed. Though I do not have a name for the condition (my linguistics training is, oh, 30 years behind me), tdvance's explanation sounds, um, sound. The writing trails the mental speech act enough that the most frequently used representation of the homonyms outweighs the proper one. Guess that's why there's no escaping from proof-reading, even for the most literate.

I also think tdvance's hypothesis is very plausible. It sounds like it
applies to me. Needs library research, and if an answer doesn't turn
up, somebody needs to design an experiment to test it.

I have the problem of the original post, not often, but often to recognize
immediately what Andre was referring to. Certain letters and sounds get
confused, while others don't.

What I think is similar in effect but may or may not be similar in cause:
I sometimes find that I have typed a "b" instead of a "p". I am not a
touch-typist, and have to look at the keyboard frequently to be sure
my fingers are going to the right places, so I see the letters on the
keys. But the letter on the key is "B", not "b", so the difference should
be obvious. Dunno what's going on there.

Zero-One, What a post! Sure sounds like a stroke. Don't do that!

Coincidentally, I had a big white spot in the center of my field of vision
for a few minutes after I got out of bed this morning. Probably lack of
blood to the retinas, caused by low blood pressure, caused by lack of
food. I need to get to the grocery store.

I see "ration" where "ratio" is meant, a lot. If I recall correctly, I even
did it once myself, which really surprised me. I wonder if "formular" is
the same kind of deal, or if that's just how those people pronounce it.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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