4 ms·
One answer is parsing ambiguities. https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/1705/w%c3%b6rter-mit-ung%c3%bcnstiger-silbentrennung https://german.stackexchange
by schoen 8y ago
One answer is parsing ambiguities.
https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/1705/w%c3%b6rter-mit-ung%c3%bcnstiger-silbentrennung https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/1705/w%c3%b6rter-...
(replaced with better link)
English has tons of ambiguities, including many possible parsing ambiguities of this kind, but written English would have many more ambiguities without a delimiter between words.
- yorwba 8y agoSeparating parts of compounds by spaces prevents ambiguous decompositions, but allows ambiguous groupings. (Like "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.", which would be less confusing if "fruit flies" were written "fruitflies" or at least "fruit-flies".) I'm not sure which is worse.
- jacobush 8y agoIt makes for a different intended, pun, kind of?
- schoen 8y agoI had the intuition that the spaces strictly decreased ambiguity, but your point makes me really unsure of this. But written German already distinguishes nouns from verbs with capitalization; can the grouping problem be made worse by spaces in the absence of ambiguities about which part of speech a word is? (Obviously the German convention doesn't totally eliminate all such ambiguities, since "wie" 'like (preposition)' and "mögen" 'like (verb)' are both lower case, although "Fliegen" 'flies (insects) and "fliegen" 'flies (verb)' can be distinguished sufficiently to remove the specific kind of ambiguity present in this particular sentence even if "wie" and "mögen" were homonyms.) (corrected thanks to commenter below!)
- tannhaeuser 8y agomögen = to like Magen = stomach
- verelo 8y agoThe hyphen seems like a very reasonable compromise, at the very least it tells you the space was intentionally omitted and it should be read together as a compound.
- ummonk 8y agoYeah, hyphen seems best. Still wouldn’t solve cases where you need to embed one compound inside another, but otherwise it is good. Maybe languages should just have parantheses though to explicitly indicate the parse tree.
- verelo 8y agoThe good news is we are designing languages for humans, not computers, so we can make a big mess of it and still get the message most of the time. If we were designing for computers, we would certainly prefer more data to interpret the intent.