this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
1845 points (98.1% liked)

Comic Strips

12519 readers
3641 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

The rules are simple:

Web of links

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

You re-read sentences much more often than you might suspect and it happens with all kinds of sentences, even grammatically correct ones. Garden-path sentences, for example "the old men the boat", are specifically crafted to demonstrate this and they essentially are doing the same thing as using 'r' and 'u' as a substitute for words: they violate the Gricean maxim of manner and that one relies a lot on expectation.

However, one could make a case that in some situations, like a "how r u" via text, the replacement is ubiquitous and somewhat expected and doesn't cause any impediment to understanding. It's definitely a hinderance when a more verbose communication is expected. Might be a neat subject for a phonetic study, honestly.