Skeime 15 hours ago

This is not necessary. Practiced German speakers generally do not struggle with splitting words into their components because syllables follow relatively predictable patterns. You will run into ambiguities from time to time, of course, but the same applies to tons of other features of natural languages as well. (Do you want to outlaw homophones in English?)

Anyway, there is also a perfectly acceptable and established way of making German words easier to parse if need be: hyphens. So Hyphen-Case instead of PascalCase.

2
umanwizard 14 hours ago

When I was learning to read German, for the longest time I thought the word “letztendlich” was “letz-tendlich” (which is meaningless but at least theoretically pronounceable) rather than “letzt-endlich” (which is what it actually is).

I’m sure a native German speaker wouldn’t make the same mistake, though.

hengheng 11 hours ago

The century old tradition has set up a couple rakes for native speakers to step into.

"Selbständig" (freelancing) is obviously derived like self-standing, but "selb" is archaic and completely unused, prompting native learners to write 'selbstständig, which is wrong.

Couple more ones like this. Ask a native speaker about hinüber vs herüber, they will be perplexed, because it feels so dialectal. And nobody even knows about imperfect tense vs perfect tense, it's just stylistics to most.

generic92034 9 hours ago

> prompting native learners to write 'selbstständig, which is wrong.

Not anymore:

https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/selbststaendig

hengheng 8 hours ago

Heh.

gloxkiqcza 14 hours ago

Interesting insight, thanks! Linguistics is fascinating, especially in the wider cognitive science context.