= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
TheOtherDave comments on Other people's procedural knowledge gaps - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (47)
Sure.
Similar things are potentially true of all aspects of grammar/spelling/word choice that aren't strictly necessary in order to convey the meaning of a phrase... for example, you'll generally no what I mean from context even if I confuse "no" and "know."
For my own part, I have a fondness for using different signals to invoke different referents (and for not using different signals to invoke the same referent), but I acknowledge that other people's mileage varies, and that we could accept a lot of linguistic/orthographic abberations without significantly reducing comprehensibility.
The phrases "generally no" and "generally know" both appear frequently in English. "it's a" is orders of magnitude more common than "its a." Replacing "know" with "no" doesn't significantly reduce comprehensibility--but it does make the phrase take longer to parse. Replacing "it's" with "its" doesn't reduce comprehensibility at all, nor does it make the phrase any harder to read.
There are a few situations where making a distinction can eliminate a syntactic ambiguity, as in "its fun"/"it's fun". There are also a few more where it eliminates a non-ambiguous but awkward construction, as in "it's its own server". And of course it'd introduce another kind of irregularity unless you got rid of the contraction apostrophe altogether, which might lead to some other strangeness that I haven't thought of yet.