How do you tell a spelling mistake from a grammar mistake? [duplicate]

Question

How do you tell a spelling mistake from a grammar mistake? For example:

1. Your the best.
2. This iz the end.
3. I likes music.
4. She preatend to be asleep.

One method is to read the erroneous sentence aloud (let’s call it the ‘speech method’): if the sentence sounds correct then it has a spelling mistake, otherwise it has a grammar mistake. Applied to the examples, 1 and 2 have spelling mistakes, and 3 and 4 have grammar mistakes.

Another method is to look up each word of the erroneous sentence in a dictionary (let’s call it the ‘dictionary method’): if the sentence uses a word that is not in the dictionary, then it has a spelling mistake, otherwise it has a grammar mistake. Applied to the examples, 1 and 3 have grammar mistakes, and 2 and 4 have spelling mistakes.

The problem is that these two methods give different results (for 1 and 4, not for 2 and 3). Which method should I use?

Answer 1

You can’t always tell which type of mistake it is. It might be one or the other, or even both or neither. Consider the following:

• This sentence has a spelling mistak.
• This sentence are ungrammatical.
• If the miss steaks are over there, perhaps it’s both.
• if the missed steaks are over here, though, that might be intentional.

But to answer your question: you need to first try to understand the intent. Then if the sentence doesn’t match that intent, you can look more carefully for causes. Typos that result in words not recorded in dictionaries would be obvious spelling mistakes; but if all the words in the sentence are valid English words, things become a lot more messy.

If you consider grammatical correctness to be independent of intent (which is perfectly legitimate to do), it becomes a matching exercise to see if any combination of the tenets of your chosen grammar can produce the sentence.

The trap, however, is that there are numerous English dialects. It’s even worse with rhyming slang such as “He’s on the dog”: “dog and bone” rhymes with “telephone”, then you drop words out. It’s not a spelling mistake if it’s really what they wanted to say. Likewise, “Who ya callin’ short?” can be considered ungrammatical, but it’s completely idiomatic in some dialects.

In summary:

• Spelling: pick a dictionary and try to find the words.
• Grammar: pick a grammar and check if the sentence confirms to it.
• General rule: check the text against the intent.

Answer 2

The distinction depends on what is on the mind of the person who is making the mistake: is that person mistaken about the relevant rules of English grammar, or merely about the spelling? When we see a mistake, we can usually think of a reasonable explanation of what led the person to make the mistake, and then classify the mistake accordingly. For example, it is reasonable to think that a person who wrote 'This iz the end' is relatively clear about how to structure this sentence and is only mistaken about the spelling of is. We would thus say that this is a spelling mistake.

Sometimes, it is, however, difficult to be sure what was on the person's mind. Did the person who wrote 'Your the best' want to write 'You're the best' and was mistaken in thinking that you're can be spelled as your? If so, this would be a spelling mistake. But maybe the person really wanted to write your and mistakenly thought that English syntax permits combining your and the best in this way. In that case, the person would be making a mistake about the grammar. Or, perhaps, the person knows that this combination does not fit the standard rules of the syntax, but mistakenly thinks that 'Your the best' is some sort of an idiom that is an exception to the standard rules. That would be a mistake of yet another kind. If we are not sure what was on the person's mind, we cannot be sure how to classify the mistake.

There is thus no simple rule for classification of such mistakes that can be applied solely on the basis of what the mistake looks like; the classification is always based on our (more or less reliable) reconstruction of how the person was led to make the mistake.

Answer 3

Grammar is in the ear; spelling, the eye.

spoken/sounds wrong	written/looks wrong	error in
no	no	none
yes	no	grammar
no	yes	spelling
yes	yes	both

If it sounds right when you hear it spoken but not when you see it written, then it cannot be a grammatical error. It can only be an error in orthographic transcription.

Grammar faults cannot be seen, only heard, because grammar is a property peculiar to the real language, the spoken one.

Spelling faults cannot be heard, only seen, because spelling is a property peculiar to the technology of writing. The same is true of such things as upper- versus lowercase, compound words with or without any separators, italic versus roman, kerning and ligatures, and much else besides. Technology is complicated.

Like all other technology, spelling is an invention, a deliberate creation, not the natural product of the human brain’s neurological hardware. It is constantly being fiddled with by its technologists, and fumbled with by those less well taken to such technologies.

Grammar was not created by deliberate intent over the ages. It developed organically, even unconsciously, in the minds of its living speakers. It continues to do so just as long as that language remains spoken, and then it does not. Once an organism dies, organic growth ceases. So too with language.

Answer 4

In communication, an origin/source/sender/encoder (who) encodes a message/content (what) into a signal/form (how) and sends it to a channel/path/line/medium. A destination/sink/receiver/decoder (to whom) receives a corresponding signal/form (how) from the channel/path/line/medium and decodes it into a message/content (what).

To properly answer the question, one should distinguish between encoding errors, signal defects, decoding failures, decoding errors and message defects (the terms ‘error’, ‘defect’ and ‘failure’ are borrowed from software testing). An error in a process (encoding or decoding) may result in a defect in its product (encoded signal or decoded message), and a defect in a product (encoded signal) may result in a failure in a subsequent process (decoding).

An encoding error at the lexical level or grammatical level may result in

• a signal defect at the lexical level (e.g. ‘This iz the end.’), in which case the destination can detect the encoding error, can classify the encoding error as lexical and can correct the signal defect to the nearest valid signal (e.g. ‘This is the end.’); or
• a signal defect at the grammatical level (e.g. ‘Your the best.’), in which case the destination can detect the encoding error, cannot classify the encoding error and can correct the signal defect to the nearest valid signal (e.g. ‘You’re the best.’, which happens to be a heterograph of the defective signal); or
• no signal defect (e.g. ‘Give me an egg sample.’), in which case the destination cannot detect the encoding error, cannot classify the encoding error and cannot correct the signal defect.

Thus, unless the destination knows the origin’s message, the destination can only detect lexical encoding errors resulting in lexical signal defects. However the destination can always detect lexical and grammatical signal defects.

Coming back to the examples given in the question: ‘Your the best.’ and ‘I likes music.’ have an encoding error (of unknown level) resulting in a grammatical signal defect, while ‘She preatend to be asleep.’ and ‘This iz the end.’ have a lexical encoding error resulting in a lexical signal defect.