[arkensaw]

> It’s full of silent letters, as in numb, knee, and honour. A given sound can be spelled in multiple ways (farm, laugh, photo), and many letters make multiple sounds (get, gist, mirage).

that last one is hardly fair - gist and mirage are french words. might as well complain about the silent letters in rendezvous or faux pas.

[pessimizer]

Almost every English word is French, except for the most important ones.

[arkensaw]

Touche

[normie3000]

Call me a douche, but the e in "touche" is silent, whereas that in "touché" is voiced.

[arkensaw]

I was lazy, I didn't do the accent.

[jleyank]

The food is French, the animal is Anglo Saxon. At least English lacks compound words or whatever German calls those 30-character constructions.

[usrnm]

> At least English lacks compound words or whatever German calls those 30-character constructions.

Not entirely true. English, as any other Germanic language, still likes to compound words to produce a new meaning, the main difference is that, as opposed to most other Germanic languages, spaces are usually retained in writing. But this is just a spelling difference, the underlying process is the same.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)

[1718627440]

Does that mean, that "compound word" counts as a single word? And how do I distinguish between "a" "compound" "word" and "a" "compound word"?

[usrnm]

Depends on your definition of a word and how it relates to writing. It's not such a simple question, actually.

Let's consider "scheepskapitein", "Schiffskapitän" and "ship captain". All three are formed the exact same way and mean roughly the same thing, but it's customary in Dutch and German to spell it without a space and in English it's considered correct to have a space in between. Note, that there are no spaces in speech, it's simply a writing convention. So, how many words are there in this example?

[1718627440]

I don't know, I think German laymen have a unambiguous understanding. "der Schiffskapitän" = 2, "des Schiffes Kapitän" = 3

Sure, linguists can dissect everything and should, but how does the English laymen perceive it?

[onestay42]

"Cattle labeling meat labeling supervision task transfer act" is just as bad as Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, English just gets to use spaces where German doesn't. The underlying construction is the same. (I definitively got that translation wrong)

[magarnicle]

Usually English will try to come up with a single, Latin-or-Greek-derived word for compound ideas like this, which is another bad habit.

So surgery is full of -ectomies instead of -cut-outs.

[1718627440]

Medicine terms in German also use Latin or Greek, since this is the subject language, so this is a bad example.

[arkensaw]

English gets to use a sentence. It can be reworded any number of ways. I did a bit of quick googling and the clearest English I came up with for `Regulation (EC) No 1760/2000` is "Requirements for the Labelling of Minced Beef" which is a lot easier to process than Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. The reason we split code over lines is the same reason we split sentences into words. Easier for the brain to parse.

I wonder do German brains work on a much longer context window because of the language?

[1718627440]

> I wonder do German brains work on a much longer context window because of the language?

Maybe, but more due to the spelling of numbers and long sentences. Compound words are not an example of this, since Germans can parse these words just fine as different things. It just means that the lowest "tokenization" in everyday use is not the word, but subcomponents of them.

Do English native speakers "tokenize" expressions in words? Do you see it as '(labelling) (of) (minced)' or '(label)l(ing) (of) (minc)(ed)' ?

I can't speak for most Germans, but the algorithm I think I use is just greedy from left to right. This is also consistent with how mistokenization in common puns works, so I think this is common.

In primary school we trained to recognize syllable boundaries. Is that just a German thing, or is this common in other countries? You need to know these for spelling and once you know these, separating word components becomes trivial.

[detaro]

a) the title of the regulation is not equivalent to the law (unsurprisingly), onestay42's translation is clunky but a lot closer

b) the official title of the law was "Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung", so how again is it that English "gets to use a sentence" and German doesn't? German has the choice depending on context, sometimes having one word is convenient.

[arkensaw]

I'm not a German speaker. Why would someone use such a long word as a convenience?

[bmacho]

Maybe in speech they are similar, but not in writing. The underlying construction is as different as it can be. English puts " " between words, and German does not.

[ochrist]

In Danish knee is 'knæ' and the K is pronounced very clearly. It's interesting that English speaking people have forgotten how to pronounce K before N, so the Danish king Knud became Canute.