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> the Deppenleerzeichen which is a space between combined words that are usually and famously not separated by space in correct German. We feel you over here i

• chromanoid 2y ago
  > Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two. This is how language evolves nowadays. :/
  • mikae1 2y ago
    Or degrades, depending on how you see it. dagw explains how splitting or not splitting carries meaning[1]. I actually think it's a nice construct. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41796834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41796834
• dingnuts 2y ago
  can you explain the mechanism by which a swedish language keyboard becomes Americentric? If they train the predictive text function on swedish text, I don't know why it would do English-y things, and if they didn't train it on Swedish how does it work at all? It's very surprising, and interesting, to me that this category of problem, in this particular context, is even possible
  • riedel 2y ago
    I also split incorrectly German compounds because it makes autocomplete simply much more usable. IMHO a soft break +backspace key would be needed on the android keyboard to make predictions usable in compound languages.
    • wkat4242 2y ago
      Yeah the same in Dutch. Though we don't really care so much about mixing English customs with Dutch. In Germany the language purity seems to be a much hotter topic. In Holland we're pretty pragmatic about it. If it works, go for it. Personally I think our "language culture" is overrated and I wouldn't care if Dutch just disappeared completely in favour of English.
  • hibbelig 2y ago
    It’s autocomplete being based on words. It knows computer and it knows keyboard and so in English it is trivial to type computer keyboard. In German it also knows Computer and Tastatur, but I can’t use autocomplete to type Computertastatur. Actually I just learned I can. Apparently this word is in the dictionary. But there are just so many compound nouns, it’s impossible for them all to be in the dictionary. To make it work in such a language it has to understand about constructing compound nouns.
  • dagw 2y ago
    The core model seems to have a lot learned behaviour that it applies to all (latin) languages. One is that people sometimes fail to hit space between words and when that happens, in most cases, people actually wanted to insert a space between the two distinct words, and this behaviour has carried over to other languages. Also In Swedish splitting the words is many cases not incorrect, but just changes the meaning. For example is Swedish an "English teacher" (Engelsk lärare) would be a teacher that is from England, while an "Englishteacher" is a teacher the teaches the subject English. So "He is an English teacher" and "He is an Englishteacher" would both be valid sentences in Swedish, but the predictive text model seems to assume you wanted the first one.
    • bargle0 2y ago
      “He is an English Englishteacher” gives me a chuckle.
• d3VwsX 2y ago
  Yes. Is there ANY way good to type combined words using the default Android keyboard? I keep manually removing spaces, and then the spellchecker of course incorrectly marks the combined word as being incorrect.