What irritates you the most with your own language?

CurlyMoustache@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 200 points –

Mine is people who separate words when they write. I'm Norwegian, and we can string together words indefinetly to make a new word. The never ending word may not make any sense, but it is gramatically correct

Still, people write words the wrong way by separating them.

Examples:

  • "Ananas ringer" means "the pineapple is calling" when written the wrong way. The correct way is "ananasringer" and it means "pineapple rings" (from a tin).

  • "Prinsesse pult i vinkel" means "a princess fucked at an angle". The correct way to write it is "prinsessepult i vinkel", and it means "an angeled princess desk" (a desk for children, obviously)

  • "Koke bøker" means "to cook books". The correct way is "kokebøker" and means "cookbooks"

I see these kinds of mistakes everywhere!

242

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

My language is diglossic - it has a written form and a spoken form that are very different to each other. It's quite difficult to understand the written form if you've only grown up speaking and listening to the language, as the written form is essentially the language as spoken in the 1600s.

To compare it to English, it would be like saying "Where are you?" to someone over the phone, but then having to send them "Wherefore art thou?" as a text.

"wherefore" means "why" not "where".

She wasn't asking him "where are you?" but rather "why did it have to be you?"

Ah I see, thanks for the correction! (It also kind of demonstrates the problems I have with my own language :P)

Great example. Wherefore doesn't mean where. Lol

**Don't mean this snarky. Do find it funny tho.

"Whither" (to where) might be a closer fit than "wherefore" (why)