I think I know what you're trying to say. I've always had trouble putting it into words. The lack of one-to-one correspondence between thoughts/ideas and speech/language and the limits of spoken language as a means of transmitting ideas between seperate minds. It really bothers me when I can see that what I had in my mind is not completely contained in my message and trying to improve it only leads to more confusion on the recipient's side and just ends up being counter-productive.
That made me thinking: is it correct to write else's or else'. It ends on "s" phonetically, bot not morphologically (is that the right word?); I'm confused.
So am I. I'm not very proficient in linguistics but perhaps the word you are looking for is orthography, perhaps... Though if we are to be meticulous, the genus proximum in the definition of orthography would be "a study or a science", which makes it inaplicable as a property of a word. In other words, I'm not sure if it's valid to say "the orthography of a word", even though it sounds alright to me. Maybe "the orthographic represantion" would be more appropriate? Actually, I often hear "the phonology of a language" so it must be that it has other definitions, that do not include "study" or "science" as genus proximum, but something that a language or a word can posess. Well, it's probably just an accepted manner of speech and I'm just looking for patterns where none are needed.
I'm really not qualified to give explanations for anything related to English language.
Somebody else's seems correct to me. I wouldn't know how to pronounce somebody else'. Maybe it's an exception, or perhaps it is indeed the spelling that matters and not the pronounciation in the case of building possesives.
This really makes me appreciate the phonetic writing system of my native language.
Is it correct to use the word "reiteration" when "iteration" already means the process of repeating?
Sure, in the case of repeating an iteration. That's an interesting observation actually, I never thought about it.
There are many pleonasms and inconsistences in spoken languages though and we have to remember that their speakers are imperfect meat bags who should not be expected to be unconditionally logical and consistent. It's natural to have a word whose meaning contains something like "repetition" contain the prefix -re and since it's so common in everyday speech we're free to redefine it to have the same meaning as iteration. People are after all the ones who invented the language, we're free to modify it as well and create exceptions, especially if it serves a useful purpose of not feeling obliged to correct every person who uses the wrong form(and that'a probably the majority of English speakers).
As for unfollowing people... no, that feature is still locked until I reach some higher level. You'd be surprised what I'm willing to tolerate in other people just because I'm too socially inept to confront anyone about something that bothers me without making too big of a deal about it or sounding rude. The fancy term is agreeableness.
