Why YSK?
The first person who typed “should of” probably heard of it in real life that was meant to be “should’ve”, they typed “should of” online and readers thought that it’s grammatically correct to say “should of” which is in fact wrong and it became widespread throughout the years on Reddit.
I hope something could start to change.
I’m sorry but it doesn’t fully work here. ‘of’ phonetically should not be spelled with a ‘f’, so they are already using a word that is not pronounced as it is written, might as well use “would’ve”, which removes the part that isn’t pronounced as it was traditionally “ha-”, but at least it’s still correct.
They use ‘of’ because they don’t understand (or pay attention to) the grammar of what they’re saying.
Sure. Because it sounds identical. " 've" and “of” are both pronounced /əv/, hence the confusion. Native speakers write what they hear. If you ever want to stop errors like this, the only solution is spelling reform.
I never thought that these two could be pronounced the same. I pronounce of as in office whereas 've is either pronounced as in have or as in effective (or more like a mix between that and e sound and an “ö” from german) depending on how quick I want to say it.
Yes, English spelling is very misleading.
That would be a mistake in all dialects of English. It is always pronounced with a /v/ sound and the vowel is a schwa. 've is also a schwa plus /v/.
Of course, if we had spelling reform, that would cause even more errors lol
English spelling errors are common because English is not written phonetically. If you fix that, you reduce the errors, not increase them. Spelling mistakes would still occur to some degree (ultimately because one dialect’s pronunciation must be chosen for the written standard) but it would still be an improvement.
Imagine if anglophone students could learn to read and write in 2 years like their peers in Spanish and German speaking countries (many dozens of others) instead of 10.
You’re forgetting the transition period where we change a standard ppl are used to, and also that it’ll be impossible to make orthography match phonics bc different accents and dialectes of english all pronounce things differently
Edit: and also I think Spanish and German speaking counties probably just have better education systems