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.
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
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.
> For journalistic integrity, this post hasn’t been edited or reviewed by anyone. Hence the typos.