These are a dead giveaway that someone speaks English as a second language. You can tell right away because they never mix them up. Native speakers use whatever they're hearts desire.
True, my pet-peeve as an ESL speaker is that native speakers write it's instead of its all the time. They could make it right and save one character, but nope.
I'm pretty particular about my there, their, and they're but what you described happens to me all the time. My phone defaults to using "it's" and, unlike many other scenarios, I don't feel like correcting that one is worth the time it takes to do so.
A lot of people would get "its" wrong anyway, but my autocorrect on my phone changes it basically every single time. Including just now. I sometimes don't catch it, other times I don't feel like fighting a touch screen to go back and fix it. Having said all that, it's a pet peeve of mine too lol
As a native speaker who has to write grammatically correct, professional communications all day, it drives me crazy other native speakers can't be bothered.
As a non native speaker I almost always type "it's" out before my brain autocorrect reminds me "that means 'it is'" and then I have to correct it to "its" - it's kinda counter-intuitive...
The one that really kills me is the apostrophe for plural stuff. My boss did a PowerPoint the other day with fuckin apostrophes all over the place. It's not that hard.
Hah, funny. As a non-native speaker I never mix them up as I am very conscious of it when I'm writing. I'm also often translating from French in my mind to English on "paper" which helps differentiate all of them since they don't sound the same in French.
Well, native speakers are the ones that have decide what's the future of the language. Maybe you guys think that each "form" holds irrelevant or redundant information and in a few decades you fuse them all into one.
Written and spoken language is usually not 100% the same language. And this is an error that comes up when you screw up converting homophone words of your spoken mother tongue into written language.
I knew the difference between the multiple you's when I just started learning English and was around the A2 level, but when I read someone write "you're not your" to another person I thought your was not an actual word, so I used you're all the time, even for some freelance translation jobs (lol). It's really weird that someone who speaks English all the time mixes these things up, while a beginner knows all about these.
The spoken language is the actual language. If three things are written different but sound the shame, then that's a failure of the writing system, not the individual.
I would in principle agree with you, however not about English, mainly because it is now a language of international discourse of any kind, and it thus no longer belongs to the local speakers.
It now has a role Latin had until just a few centuries ago, and extrapolating a bit into the future from that example, will remain quite stable while your dialect, American, Australian, Indian, Jamaican, will change until it becomes another language entirely, no longer mutually intelligible with the other dialects.
If you want to participate in the international dialog however, you will have to learn International, which is now English including the differentiation of the theiy'res, even if your native language is English. Your grand-grandchildren may have to learn English like an Italian in 1800 had to learn Latin if he wanted to join the international discourse.
It's super interesting to watch this process unfold right now!
We already have different spellings in different countries. If we truly cared about the international part we would have a customized writing system just for that, which would probably remove the three theirs. We would also have a standard international spelling. Instead what happens is the American version gets used since they are the biggest and everyone has to deal with their version. The people who invented the fucking language get left behind. So there isn't really a reason not to fix it since English is diverging anyway.
If Americans fix it then it will just become the norm anyway, except in England because fuck America that's why. If it becomes the norm in England then nobody will care because it's England, and we aren't an empire anymore. Not that we would because there are far too many posh twats in England who get off on correcting people's grammar. Oi listen, maybe the road men could get this done, you feel me? As for what happens if Canada adopts it, ay, I wouldn't worry aboot that.
Apologies for the road man impression. Best I could do y'all.
All of ye might want to take note that not all UK people speak the same language. To say otherwise takes the pish. Anyway I best bob up the apple and pears and go beddy byes. Nice talking to you wee lad.
p.s. I tried to fit as many localisms into this as possible. How did I do?