The most commonly misspelled word in the English language

[peacetraveler22]

Do you know what it is? I notice it frequently in comments, and communications with foreign friends. Even the most intelligent and proficient speakers of English as a second language often spell the term wrong. The word is "DEFINITELY", and the most common error is to spell it "definAtely", where an "a" is used instead of an "i". Phonetically, this makes sense, and even native English speakers periodically spell the word wrong.

I was reminded of this today when I began to read a post about studying English via Skype lessons. The blogger mentioned all kinds of tenses - present perfect progressive, past perfect, past perfect simple. I must have learned these tenses in school over 20 years ago, but what the hell do they mean? :) I don't even think about them now as a native English speaker, although the tenses are self-explanatory if you contemplate the basic essence of the words. When I studied Russian for a short time, I wasn't concerned about proper grammar or spelling, because the goal was simply to be able to speak basic phrases during travels and communicate with locals in their native tongue. Some things that still confuse me about Russian:

(1) In Russian, many words are not capitalized. For instance, book titles or titles of blog posts. In English, we use a lot of capital letters.
(2) I notice that in business communications with Russian companies, they put a period after their name at the end of a salutation, which we do not do in English. For example:

Kind regards,
Shannon.

The period looks totally out of place to me.

(3) The biggest - gender for words! I don't understand how you ascertain the sex of an object? :) I know it is determined by the spelling and ending of the noun in most cases. But logically, why are passports and bread masculine rather than feminine?

Just another quick English lesson from Shannon. :) You will recall we previously discussed improper use of "YAmmy" rather than "YUmmy" here, and overall complications with English words in this post. Good luck to those who continue to study my native language! If you have any questions, never hesitate to write me. I'm always happy to help, and I greatly admire the dedication and knowledge of the multi-lingual folks around the globe!

In informal communications in my blog and with foreign friends, I never point out wrongly spelled words or improper grammar, but it grates on my nerves when native speakers misspell words and use bad grammar! I think this is a global epidemic, now that newer generations speak in weird text lingo, and shortened phrases or acronyms. Humanity is doomed! :))

Comments

[sab123.livejournal.com]

Actually, the Russian book titles are capitalized. And put in quotes when mentioned in the text (as opposed to English where they're usually italicsized in print). In the blog posts just not everyone cares with the capitalization (I know I don't). But if done properly by the rules, they would be capitalized too.

The salutation is properly a sentence in Russian, so it properly ends with a period. An interesting question is whether the book titles should have a period at the end. I think the chapter titles should, since they're also considered sentences but not when quoted in the text. The book titles probably don't for an unknown reason. But I'm not the greatest expert on the proper punctuation by far, I just use the punctuation like I feel it.

The other difference in the Russian and English communications is the greeting: in Russian it usually ends with the exclamation mark, in English with a comma.

[karakal.livejournal.com]

The period after the name at the end of a salutation is as ungrammatical in Russian as it is in English. If you could see what and how they write in Russian...

[mjol1nir.livejournal.com]

To write with no grammar mistakes - you should read a lot.
If you have met "definitely" word thousands times in your books how you can forget spelling when need to write it?

Russians know their native language also really bad. Lots write with idiotic school mistakes. Many people sometimes don't know meanings of used words. Almost nobody can use punctuation properly.
I guess this is the reason of your "in Russian, many words are not capitalized". Because of bloggers who are too lazy to poke Shift button in their keyboards.

[mjol1nir.livejournal.com]

English has huge preference over Russian in my opinion. You have only one type of appealing: "you". But we, Russians, have "вы" и "ты". Sometimes this is very confusing.
Rich spring of insult and misunderstanding.

[white-walker.livejournal.com]

In Russian you can pick up a lot of information from one word because it's synthetic language. Grammar is difficult but in return there is so much flexibilty. On the contrary there are analytic languages like Chinese where can be absent not only sex. If you not define explicitly it can be hard to distinguish plural from singular number. Just by context.

[sobaka-by.livejournal.com]

This information correct, is it?

Cause Oxford dictionary gives transcription without "E" between "T" and "L":

http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/definitely

either Cambridge does:

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/definitely

[j1980.livejournal.com]

А в английском "корабль" женского пола. У нас корабль женского пола, только если это яхта или бригантина например. Фрегат уже мужского.

[anna-sollanna.livejournal.com]

The more I learn English the more I understand that the difference between it and Russian is not only in grammar rules but in the way of thinking!
> The blogger mentioned all kinds of tenses - present perfect progressive, past perfect, past perfect simple. I must have learned these tenses in school over 20 years ago, but what the hell do they mean?
What was the native language of this blogger, English or Russian?
Most of the Russian textbooks for learning English written in such a way that it is not very easy to understand them without some knowledge from general linguistics. Tenses, quantifiers, cleft constructions, etc... Only now, having got a lot of knowledge from normal English text-books (where it was described without all that gibberish what we should say in what situations) I've finally understood what means that mysterious phrase "future in the past".

[keinkeinkein.livejournal.com]

Hello peacetraveler22, could you explain me the meaning of a word "eye-watering"? Below please find the context.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/former-nato-commander-s-new-book-predicts-invasion-of-baltic-as-putin-bids-to-make-russia-a-great-a7036911.html

Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, the commander of the US army in Europe, has described Russian advances in electronic warfare – a field in which they were typically supposed to be backward – as “eye-watering”.

[allanyan.livejournal.com]

Absolutely.

[nar-row.livejournal.com]

> The biggest - gender for words! I don't understand how you ascertain the sex of an object? :)

We don't ascertain, we simply remember. :)
Russian is quite hard to learn.

i got a better one.

[creaze.livejournal.com]

How to say "occuring every two years"?

Biennial. Not even Biannual.

[sasha-severny.livejournal.com]

"(1) In Russian, many words are not capitalized. For instance, book titles or titles of blog posts"

According to the Russian Grammar rules book titles or titles of blog posts are capitalized by the whole thing just once. For example, the title "The most commonly misspelled word in the English language " in Russian looks like "The most commonly misspelled word in the english language " while in English it looks like "The Most Commonly Misspelled Mord in the English Language". The Russians capitalize the whole title while the English capitalize each word in the title. Makes sense?

[sasha-severny.livejournal.com]

"(3) The biggest - gender for words! I don't understand how you ascertain the sex of an object? :) I know it is determined by the spelling and ending of the noun in most cases. But logically, why are passports and bread masculine rather than feminine?"

It's a grammatical gender, not the object's gender. Objects don't have genders even in Russian. Any object in nominative case that has the ending "a" is feminine in Russian. If an object has the ending "o" it is neutral. If an object has no ending it is masculine. Simple. You don't even need to think about it. There are some exceptions, though. These people you are talking with have no idea what they are talking about. They have no education to talk about such matters.