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Comments on What causes people to write compound words as distinct words?

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What causes people to write compound words as distinct words?

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In many Germanic and Finno-ugric languages there are many compound words. One does not write "yhdys sana", but rather "yhdyssana". Learning to write these correctly is notoriously hard for people, at least in Finland and Norway; there are mistakes everywhere, even in the simple and systematic cases, like compound words created from two nouns with nothing fancy happening.

Often it is the influence of English that gets the blame. However, I vaguely recall reading arguments to the contrary, probably based on chronology; the problems were present before English was as dominating as it is today.

What causes people to write compound words as distinct words? Is it the influence of English or is there some other significant cause, too?

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This is a known phenomenon also in Swedish where it is called särskrivning ("writing apart"). The wikipedia article Särskrivning (Swedish, no English translation available) with sources claims that indeed the influence from English is to blame. The article also quotes a Dutch similar term Engelse ziekte ("English Disease", see the corresponding Dutch wikipedia article), suggesting that this is also a problem in Dutch and likely in all of the Germanic languages.

The article also claims that in more recent times, wrong auto-correcting features from MS Word and similar are also to blame. But it also quotes Swedish examples from the 1700-1800s when influence from English was non-existent (but influence from French was significant). Although these examples predate a formalised grammar, which in Sweden didn't happen until the 19th century. So apparently in older times, there was no defined way of writing such words together or apart.

The wikipedia article also has an interesting remark about cursive writing, which was still taught in Swedish schools as late as the 1990s. A newer, more modern form of cursive writing was introduced during the 1970s with words and letters more apart, which could in turn indirectly lead to "writing apart" mistakes becoming more common.

Personally I don't think any particular influence is to blame - the cause is simply poor grammar knowledge of your own native language in general. Just the other day I were proofreading something with "writing apart" all over it and the person who wrote in barely knows English at all. To say that they did so because they were influenced by English would be ridiculous. They were simply illiterate in general. There is naturally a direct relation between poor grammar and people reading less books/articles in their native language.

Similarly, people who speak a Germanic language often have problems writing English words together, when they shouldn't be. Just as I'm writing this very text, the English spell checker told me to change from "autocorrecting" to "auto-correcting".

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Microsoft auto-correct (2 comments)
Microsoft auto-correct
tommi‭ wrote almost 2 years ago

Some Norwegians have also mentioned the problem of Microsoft «correcting» grammar.

Dictionaries are notoriously bad at compound words in Norwegian. There are many examples. Microsoft Office's dictionaries are one example. Another example is Wordfeud; I play this every now and then, and I try laying down so many words that the game simply does not allow. That said, don't use Wordfeud to learn Norwegian. The dictionary is weird, and contains many non-Norwegian words... Usually, if the dictionary suggests splitting the compound word, that's an indication that the word is indeed correct; because if the suggestion is to split, that implies you are using two valid words. In Norwegian, you bring them together. But there are many examples of incorrectly merged words, such as "en del" => "endel". That just doesn't make any sense. It's just as annoying every time somebody does it. That includes my family members.