Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Actually, dools is quite correct. Generalizing from spelling mistakes is a classic technique for tracing phonetic shifts in language. That's because misspelling is almost always in favor of something that sounds the same (e.g. their/there/they're).

One couldn't ask for a better example than "then/than". When I read the previous sentence out loud, the first "than" sounds closer to "then" than to the second "than".




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: