On the SDMB, at least, we have the famous “teh” along with many others (my favorite is “way laste”). These are English examples. But as I was reading my copy of Will Cuppy’s delightful “The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody”, I came across the tidbit that Frederick the Great was an atrocious speller, at least in French: astieure for à cette heure. Well, what do you expect from a German?
So, multilingual Dopers, your mission, if you chose to accept it, is to find humorous examples of spelling mistakes in other languages and let us know about them so the English-speakers won’t feel quite so illiterate in their own language.
Well, you can’t exactly spell wrong in Chinese, but I see ¶Â¤H¼¨ more than the proper ¤^¤H¼¨. Why do they think being hated by black people is so awful?
Oh. I think this has to do with a wordplay. When you say somebody is an “African monk” in Cantonese, it is the equivalent of the first phrase, and it sounds exactly like the second phrase.
Of course, this is also a sad commentary on the local literacy level.
Otherwise, I’d think that languages with consistent spelling would tend not to have as many spelling errors as you see in English where the spelling is highly irregular.
For children and others learning to write, however, I did notice that certain letters could be confused in German. For example, the letters b and d, at the beginning of a syllable, are pronounced as in English. Elsewhere however they are pronounced like p and t respectively. Children sometimes confuse the two as they learn to spell.
The Dutch definitive particle (?) ‘het’ is very easily misspelled as ‘hte’. Which, if the English spell-checker is on, the computer proceeds to ‘correct’ as ‘the’, thereby keeping the meaning but changing the language. I turned off auto-correction on Word for that very reason.
