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The German language is superior in this regard because there it would we either "peanut, butter" or "peanutbutter".
by jeena 8y ago
The German language is superior in this regard because there it would we either "peanut, butter" or "peanutbutter".
- burkaman 8y agoIt's the same in English in this case. There's no pause when you talk about "peanut butter", but there's a significant one when listing the two.
- boomlinde 8y agoIt wouldn't help much with tokenization of spoken words since it's hard to tell from its pronunciation whether an English phrase is compounded, hyphenated or separate words.
- gnulinux 8y agoHow is this relevant? Peanut butter isn't spoken like "peanut, butter" it's spoken like "peanutbutter".
- ghaff 8y agoIt depends. If I'm enunciating clearly as I tend to do when I dictate to voice assistants, I'm going to tend to tend to distinctly pronounce the "t" at the end of peanut and the "b" at the beginning of butter which tends to produce something of a pause between the two words.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoI'd say it was probably worse in this respect, doesn't German have a lot more of these "compound" words that would need to be parsed in this way?
- wil421 8y agoExactly, car insurance is much better than Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung.
- Quai 8y agoIf you want to make German look bad, sure, but a "better" translation of car insurance would be Autoversicherung. I mean, "car insurance" is much better than "motor vehicle liability insurance" too.. ;-)
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoI know there's still a difference in length, but don't let English orthography fool you, English likes big compounds too: "high voltage electricity grid systems engineer team supervisor" is structurally the same as the unspaced German monstrous compounds. (I.e. the real difference between English and German in this area is just a matter of orthography and not actual linguistic structure.)
- snaky 8y agoIt would be easier in languages that make use of a high degree of inflection, especially in Slavic languages, where - that's unusual in other language families - declension also depends on whether the word is a noun or an adjective.
- mathie25 8y agoFrench would be easier to understand as peanut butter is "beurre d'arachides" (butter from peanuts). The "de" (or d' in that example) is given you the "context"/what the butter is made of. Same for apple juice, it's "jus de pommes" and etc.