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boxed | 4 days ago

The word splitting in English is an accident of history, not a linguistic reality though. This is hilariously obvious to Swedish speakers :P

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eszed|4 days ago

Well, it's a linguistic reality - all of which are accidents of history - which absolutely isn't to say it reflects anything definitive about reality reality. My point is that English has a straightforward way of dealing with this (admittedly arbitrary) case, which OP either ignores or doesn't understand, and instead adds unnecessary categorical complication.

boxed|4 days ago

It's not a linguistic reality in spoken English is what I meant. We Swedish speakers can hear it when English speakers pronounce the space and when they don't, because we're super sensitive to that difference because our language cares. We can easily flip from one state to the other and repeat the word/words back and English speakers will instantly hear that it sounds weird and wrong but often they don't understand why.

English spelling does NOT line up with pronounced English when it comes to what we in Swedish calls "särskrivning" which is a word that roughly means "separateness writing".