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Re: [ontolog-forum] (OT) German

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:21:49 -0500
Message-id: <478CCF8D.3060905@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Pat's comment emphasizes the point that a significant part of the
difference between English and German is in spelling conventions:    (01)

PH> ThewayItalkEnglishoftensoundslikethat, or sopeopleoftentellme.    (02)

An example I like to use is    (03)

   Lebensversicherungsgesellschaftsangestellter    (04)

If you remove the copies of the letter S between major constituents,
you get    (05)

    Leben versicherung gesellschaft angestellter    (06)

and a word-for-word translation gives you    (07)

    life insurance company employee    (08)

But, as Pat pointed out, most people pronounce this as    (09)

    lifeinsurancecompanyemployee    (010)

Therefore, German is more helpful for the listener because it
inserts an extra sound to mark the word boundaries.    (011)

To help the reader as well as the listener, they should
consider adding a blank as well:    (012)

    Lebens versicherungs gesellschafts angestellter    (013)

or perhaps a hyphen:    (014)

    Lebens-versicherungs-gesellschafts-angestellter    (015)

or maybe extend their practice of capitalizing all nouns
to include internal nouns:    (016)

    LebensVersicherungsGesellschaftsAngestellter    (017)

This convention would also help people who are writing
morphological analyzers for German.  One machine translation
program analyzed the following word    (018)

     Toiletteneingang    (019)

which could be written ToilettenEingang for 'toilet entrance'.
But the program interpreted it as    (020)

    Toilette-nein-gang    (021)

which it translated as 'toilet denial procedure'.    (022)

Anyone who has participated in lots of meetings might consider
that a rather useful term.    (023)

John    (024)


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