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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 in Sweden. Särskrivning (roughly “word splitting”) is a “problem” far greater than the apostrophes for us. Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two.

> Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two.

This is how language evolves nowadays. :/

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

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.

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

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.

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.

“He is an English Englishteacher” gives me a chuckle.

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.

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.

> It doesn't look exotic, but English which is usually considered to be something modern.

It might have looked 'modern' (or rather progressive) seventy years ago (or thirty years ago in the east); these days using proper German seems rather backward, dated or borderline fascist.

It got pretty absurd over the last decades though. My parents were complaining about the bill they got from Telekom -- why in the world were 'Ferngespräche' listed there as 'long distance calls' in a text otherwise (near) German?

Now, I would love to see more English being used in Germany, particularly in official communication as there are plenty of people here who's first language isn't German. But why not both? It's not that much more work. Denglish however belongs strictly banned into the realm of comedy (recently I've seen a gas station advertizing its "Power Sauger" :))

> E.g. Handy for smartphone

For clarity, we already called them Handy when they were phones but not smart.

As someone who knows English and is learning German, the words "Handy" for smartphone, or "Beamer" for overhead projector, or "Oldtimer" for classic car all sound very out of place. Even hearing "das Baby" for a nursing-age baby (instead of the German "Säugling") sounds a bit weird.

I guess it's different when you grew up with those words and internalized them.

That's right, and I think Smartphone is actually competing with the good old word Handy, at least in the marketing department. I guess "Ich suche mein Smartphone." sounds somehow too snobbish in most casual contexts.

A handy means something entirely different in the US

An English chap once asked a US friend of mine for a cigarette, or as he innocently put it, "Can I bum a fag?"

There was a funny guide circulating a few years ago about "Euro-English" used in the European Union and it's institutions, that was completely incomprehensible to a native speaker.

> There was a funny guide circulating a few years ago about "Euro-English" used in the European Union and it's institutions, that was completely incomprehensible to a native speaker.

A lot of it is just (1) use of French loanwords to refer to EU-specific concepts (acquis is arguably the most famous), (2) use of genuine but rare English words – for example "subsidiarity", a word few English-speakers know, but the EU loves – but it isn't exclusive to the EU, Catholic theologians love it too (there is a whole section devoted to it in the Catholic Catechism), (3) the kind of common linguistic errors (false cognates, etc) which French speakers (and to a lesser degree, speakers of other EU languages) make when speaking English.

There are also some cases where it is hard to say if what is happening is (1) or (3), for example the use of the word "cabinet" (pronounced the French way) to refer to the office staff of a senior official

> "Kati's Ecke" (urks)

The worst I ever saw was an advertisement on a bar telling prospective patrons about the availability of "snacks´s". This is so wrong I can't even figure out how many distinct errors were made. (And yes, that's an acute accent, not an apostrophe.)

Using an apostrophe to mark a plural is often called a grocer’s apostrophe - https://www.grammar-monster.com/punctuation/using_apostrophe...

In English I’m actually ok with it for single letters or abbreviations- “your writing uses a lot of x’s and y’s”, “Can you pack away the CD’s and DVD’s”, but this is a personal quirk and definitely non-standard usage.