I wonder why? It seems to be common with native speakers.
I'm not native in English but, for me, it would seem to be nearly impossible to mix these two words even in a moment of carelessness. They mark greatly differing meanings and thus they practically live in different slots in my brain. Even a blind typo won't explain it because 'a' and 'e' are not too adjacent on a qwerty.
Anecdotally, from what I've seen in various languages, native speakers do seem to make more mistakes that are tied to spelling/pronunciation (than, then, their they're in English, aller, allé in French) whereas non-native speakers make more grammar mistakes (for example I tend to put articles at wrong places or forget them in both English and French, but the spelling mistakes are absolutely jarring).
I think because in some English dialects "than" and "then" sound very similar and many people (myself included) write by basically transcribing their internal monologue.
Interesting, this would definitely explain these errors. Similar to there's/theirs, they're/there which are similar examples of the same. Writing out words based on such a phonetic memory would explain all that.
But the next question to wonder is whether this is English specific or person specific?
Is it that native English speakers form their language primarily through phonetic patterns and translate back to spelling from there, or is that some people simply crunch spoken language and other people crunch written language in their heads?
I definitely start from letters and words, and I'm often lost at how to pronounce something because, in English, you can't deduce pronunciation from the written form. In many cases you just have to "know". But I'm not a native speaker so can't tell if this is just because of how my brain works or because I learned English later in lafe.
I can't backreference to my native language, Finnish, either. Finnish is spoken exactly as it's written. If you know how to say a word you know how to write it, and vice versa. So the phonetic and written forms do not differ.
If anyone native to English could verify that what they keep in their head is "written English", that'd be a valuable counter-point to suggest it just depends on the person.
As a native English speaker, words in the language appear to be stored against sound rather than anything else. When trying to write clear English to be read, I am reading it to myself as I write to ensure that it reads clearly, and so it's more an audio process, allowing for confusion of words that sound similar.
I would guess that those who have learned the language have a more logical, grammar based structure and write more deliberately.
"Could of" instead of "could have" being a prime example among native speakers. Although it's shocking how many people genuinely believe the former to be correct.
> I would guess that those who have learned the language have a more logical, grammar based structure and write more deliberately.
We have our own native languages with their own idiosyncrasies and we don't make mistakes like "could of" or "you're/your" in those languages. There's just no excuse for those simple mistakes...
Greek has 5 very common and 1/2 rare spellings for the sound 'i' (as in 'kit'): ι, υ, η, οι, ει /υι,ηι
Imagine if people who can't tell you're/your and write 'could of' had to face this reality...
They are lazy ignorant people and the other native speakers need to stop enabling them and making excuses.
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I'm not actually sure if 'ηι' exists, google is showering me with irrelevant results.. in any case, furthermore, there's
two ways to spell 'e' (as in bed): ε, αι
two ways to spell o: ο,ω
two ways to spell the av/ev sound: αβ/αυ , εβ/ευ
two ways to spell the af/ef sound: αφ/αυ , εφ/ευ
and more. Maybe the difference is that all this crap makes you actually pay some attention to the language if you don't want to embarrass yourself
As a native German speaker, who is basically at the same level in English now, I also started doing these weird mistakes native English speakers do. I never had this issue in German not sure what it is about English, I think it's just the random spelling vs pronunciation in English. Your brain just can't keep up matching your vocal thoughts to the right spelling when typing quickly.
I'm not native in English but, for me, it would seem to be nearly impossible to mix these two words even in a moment of carelessness. They mark greatly differing meanings and thus they practically live in different slots in my brain. Even a blind typo won't explain it because 'a' and 'e' are not too adjacent on a qwerty.