[boxed]

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".

[eszed]

Oh! Yeah, I understand what you mean. "Black hole" (the astronomical entity) and "black hole" (a hole that is black) are said differently, but it takes a good ear, and probably some training, for English speakers to notice. How interesting that speakers of (some) other languages detect that so "automatically"! There also are dialectical complications - some speakers tend to run words together more than others, or maybe use tone / stress rather than syllabic modifications to mark the changes - and I'd be interested to know the extent to which you notice those structures as well?

Nevertheless, dictionaries (conventional ones, at least) concern themselves with written rather than spoken English, so I think my point stands. :-)