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I have seen many comments on different blogs and forums where English native speakers spelled you're as your. I'm not a native speaker, but I know and understand the difference between the two. Why is there a confusion?

My initial guess is that your and you're have similar pronunciation and because I carry some accent from my native language (Romanian) I can identify the difference better.

Edit (thanks Chris): The same can be asked for other homophones: there/their/they're, its/it's.

tchrist
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Alexandru
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    Could the same be asked for homophone? there/their/they're, its/it's, site/sight.. – Chris Oct 06 '10 at 14:50
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    I have seen the wrong one so many times that now my fingers sometimes type "your" even though I know perfectly well I mean "you're". – mmyers Oct 06 '10 at 14:52
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    I don't think I can explain it any more succinctly than nohat in his comment on a related question, and I quote: "Because they have an identical shape phonologically, they become fused in the internal lexicon. All of this is just further evidence that spoken language truly is primary—at least in native speakers". – RegDwigнt Oct 06 '10 at 14:56
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    @RegDwight: That's a great explanation. But it's evidence only that spoken language is primary among those who make the mistake :-) (Or, for everyone, when they make the mistake… not necessarily all the time.) Also, being primary when producing the words doesn't necessarily mean being primary when interpreting (reading/listening), so it still helps readers if the right spelling is used. – ShreevatsaR Oct 06 '10 at 14:59
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    laziness and inattention to detail is all I can think. Then also the spell-checkers do not catch the mistakes as they are words, but people just miss them if they even bother to read/edit. – Tim Oct 06 '10 at 20:59
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    @ShreevatsaR: yeah, no arguing about the "it still helps readers if the right spelling is used" part. It's certainly tiring to have to reparse "you're sight" as "your site", and I'm merely aiming at finding the reason for such misspellings (as is the OP), not at drawing the conclusion that we should just forget about spelling altogether. As to your first point, I am not a neurolinguist enough to comment on it, though from a logician's perspective it's impeccable. (^_^) – RegDwigнt Oct 07 '10 at 15:13
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    I post this link, NSFW language and all, because it provides useful advice in a humorous and well-designed format :) – e.James Oct 14 '10 at 22:46
  • e.James, that link is fine, but his explanations of affect and effect are simplistic (and wrong). – TRiG Oct 18 '10 at 18:08
  • I'd hate to be the one that brings this particular point up but here goes. Many of us who understand the difference between the two still type your as it's shorter and the majority of people will still understand given the context of the sentence.

    This is where I fear text-speak is killing the English language, not through adding new words like lol, but by removing the core differences between such examples as your and you're.

     – Dan Hanly Jan 11 '11 at 18:00
  • @DanielHanly: I often have to read it twice when "you're" is misspelled as "your" because I the meaning of the two is in my head very different. – awe Mar 27 '12 at 09:50
  • @DanielHanly: you mean "its" rather than "it's", right? ;-) – CesarGon Apr 14 '12 at 23:53

7 Answers7

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The answer is simple.

You just need to think about how you learned your native language. By ear.

Children learn how to speak their native tongue first, and only then learned the grammar and spelling. Thus, many will "sound" a word out to spell it.

English language learners, on the other hand, usually learned how to spell a word first, and focused on pronunciation later.

OneProton
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  • What about native language learners who never really struggled with homophone confusion? Maybe heavy readers? – Chris Oct 07 '10 at 15:35
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    @Chris: people associate mis-use of your vs. you're with lower intelligence / level of education. probably one of the reasons it is so picked on – Claudiu Oct 07 '10 at 17:44
  • @Claudiu You mean linguistic intelligence, right? Also, I know plenty of people with high levels of education that still struggle with it. – Chris Oct 07 '10 at 19:56
  • @Chris. Could be. Could also be very strong visual learners. – OneProton Oct 07 '10 at 20:06
  • I don't buy this, sorry. All speakers learn their native language by ear, whatever it is; in Spanish, my native language, "vaca" and "baca" are phonologically identical, but no one writes "baca" for "vaca". – CesarGon Apr 14 '12 at 23:56
  • @Chris Dwyer: I'm literate/well-educated, and certainly I sometimes write you're instead of your, and there instead of their, for example. But I wouldn't say I "struggle with it" - they're [their/there?!] just mistakes we make because orthography conflicts with phonetics. I suggest anyone who doesn't actually know the correct forms is by definition not even adequately-, let alone well- educated. – FumbleFingers Apr 14 '12 at 23:59
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    @FumbleFingers I better get me a new doctor then! :) – Chris Apr 16 '12 at 21:04
  • @Chris Dwyer: In my experience, these "homonymic typos" aren't uncommon in casual contexts like email, Internet chat, etc. Perhaps I say "not uncommon" because when they do occur, they're highly noticeable - when reading, I mean, not when writing. In general I wouldn't trust myself to proofread my own text because you tend to miss your own errors, but I'd almost bet my life I've never missed this particular kind of mistake. It's only made by competent speakers when their not checking they're words (or when there just messing about! :) – FumbleFingers Apr 16 '12 at 21:20
  • This doesn't fully answer the question. It's much more common to mispell "you're" as "your" than the other way around. But why? If people were wholly influenced by the sound of words, they would mispell "your" as "you're" about equally often. But they don't, so there must be other factors involved. – ekhumoro Dec 27 '13 at 03:18
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I think that the same goes for all languages. Native speakers that do not take the time to learn their own language properly, or that do not read much, tend to misspell homophones.

In French, for instance, many people will replace infinitive form (« manger », to eat) with past participle (« mangé », eaten), or confuse « ses » and « ces » (his,her vs these).

Astonishingly enough, foreigners that study the language do not have this homophony problem in their “source language” and therefore are aware of a grammatical difference. It sounds like people assume translation is mathematically speaking an injective thing.

Benoit
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  • Sot, seau, sceau :) – Benjol Oct 07 '10 at 05:01
  • hmm those ones are not really used everyday… – Benoit Oct 07 '10 at 05:02
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    Japanese takes the medal for homophones. 神 god, 紙 paper, and 髪 hair are all pronounced "kami". So, Kami no kami no kami could mean "The paper god's hair." Of course, they're written differently, but in spoken language... meaning is inferred by context. Of course, this means that wordplay is a big part of Japanese humor. more on homophones: http://www.kanjiclinic.com/kc24final.htm – OneProton Oct 07 '10 at 20:12
  • @OneProton I think overall Mandarin has to be awarded gold for homophones, especially if you disregard tone (as you did with the Japanese examples – only 紙 and 髪 are complete homophones with tones included). Japanese does have lots of them, but in Mandarin there are about 400 characters pronounced yi and about 250 pronounced shi. Even with tones, there are 140 characters pronounced shì and over 300 pronounced yì. This is what makes ‘poetry’ like 施氏食狮史 Shī shì shí shī shǐ possible in Mandarin. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 12 '19 at 12:18
  • @JanusBahsJacquet You could be right, but I'm not familiar enough with Mandarin to know for sure. However, I don't think you can ignore tones. Tones completely change the word in Mandarin, but in Japanese meaning is more or less determined by context. There are pitch variations, but even those can vary from place to and don't change the meaning. I do know that from a mathematical perspective, Japanese has far fewer phonemes (22) than Mandarin (34). https://www.eupedia.com/linguistics/number_of_phonemes_in_european_languages.shtml which leads me to think there are more duplicate sounds. – OneProton Jan 15 '19 at 01:48
  • @OneProton I don’t think homophones ignoring tones are homophones either. The reason why Mandarin ends up with more homophones despite a higher phoneme inventory (and more possible syllables due to the higher syllable complexity) is that each character always maps to a single syllable bearing the meaning of that character; that’s not the case in Japanese. The majority of these monosyllabics are rarely used on their own in Modern Mandarin, but they do exist. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 15 '19 at 02:01
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Interesting. So every character maps to a single syllable of 32 phonemes and a tone (128 possibilities?). Sounds like as an academic exercise Mandarin may have more, but from a practical perspective, maybe, maybe not. It sounds like both language have quite a few homophones, in either case. Interestingly, I've always posited that ironically Japanese relies on Chinese characters more than Mandarin does as romanization often results in meaning loss without context. However Mandarin can usually be translated into pinyin due to the use of tones without loss of meaning. – OneProton Jan 16 '19 at 18:18
  • @OneProton I worded that poorly. Each character (with very few, extremely rare exceptions always maps to a monosyllable; many characters do have multiple readings. This is different from Japanese where even many on’yomi are polysyllabic. There are just over 400 distinct syllables in Mandarin (discounting tones), but they are very unevenly distributed: gei and dei, for example, each correspond to only one character/word each, whereas yi corresponds to over 400 characters. Not all syllables exist in all tones. It’s a mess. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 16 '19 at 18:52
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The confusion is that in many UK (and probably US) schools the difference is not taught. The use of the apostrophe is considered by many to be totally confusing and so it is omitted in many places where it is required.

There is a name for the addition of extra apostrophes in places where they are not needed. These are "Grocers' Apostrophes" which refers to the common sight on market stalls and grocers' shops where the price labels may erroneously refer to "Banana's" or Apple's".

uɐɪ
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    Really? In your schools they didn't teach you contractions, and the difference between your and you're? In my school (in Ontario, Canada) we were certainly taught this. Regardless, we were also corrected on spelling even for words that were never formally taught to us: we were expected to spell everything correctly. – Mr. Shiny and New 安宇 Oct 06 '10 at 19:59
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    In my school they did teach this, but there was a time, through the 1970's and on where formal grammar teaching seemed to fall out of favour. What mattered was that the children should express themselves and the accuracy of the language used for this was not so important. – uɐɪ Oct 07 '10 at 07:22
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    Anybody who considers the use of the apostrophe to be "totally confusing" has absolutely no business teaching English. – Jez Jul 26 '12 at 12:20
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Sometimes I wonder how often this mistake is made out of carelessness, versus ignorance. I'm well-versed in the difference betweent the two, yet I've still made the gaffe on occasion.

Due to the homophoneous nature of the words, the mistake is easily made while typing, and particularly easy to miss while proofreading, too.

J.R.
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    I'll upvote this answer because I can't really be bothered to write my own. Substantially you're right - but I think "carelessness" is perhaps a little strong, and I don't agree it's easy to miss the mistakes while proofreading. Sure, there are a few illiterate writers - but mostly these "homophonic transcription errors" occur when the writer is communicating (from his point of view) in "speech" mode through the medium of writing. It's the fingers of a fast "automatic typer" that can't spell, not his brain. – FumbleFingers Apr 15 '12 at 00:12
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In American English (I can't speak for other varieties), even though the two are both spelled and pronounced distinctly in standard writing and slower articulate speech respectively, they tend to be pronounced the same in regular speech.

you're = \yər, ˈyu̇r, ˈyȯr, ˌyü-ər\

and

your = \yər, ˈyu̇r, ˈyȯr\

(from Merriam-Webster, with American rhotic pronunciation). Note that the only difference is the one variant for "you're".

So it is understandable that there is the possibility of mistaking one for the other. This pair, like other homophones are often mentioned explicitly in language studies in elementary school in the US. Making the mistake later in life is usually simply a one time mistake (like the other homophones). If the mistake is systematic then that is probably a sign of lack of concern for orthography.

Mitch
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  • There are a number of American dialects where they're different (your is \ˈyȯr\ and you're is \ˈyər\ or \ˈyü-ər\ ), and I bet people who speak these dialects don't make this mistake as often. But I thought they were homophones in General American (\ˈyu̇r\ or \yər, depending on whether they're stressed or not). – Peter Shor May 20 '12 at 00:18
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Not an answer as such, but I'm sure this might help some people: http://yourandyoure.com/ :)

kguest
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I think people get confused because the apostrophe is used in possessives as well as contractions, but in this case the possessive your has no apostrophe.

kajaco
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