I can’t believe nobody has done this list yet. I mean, there is one about names, one about time and many others on other topics, but not one about languages yet (except one honorable mention that comes close). So, here’s my attempt to list all the misconceptions and prejudices I’ve come across in the course of my long and illustrious career in software localisation and language technology. Enjoy – and send me your own ones!
English. I can go to the store and buy a sandwich for $8.99 all in one sentence, but splitting it on periods gives you two sentences.
Oh of course, I didn’t think about punctuation occurring in the middle of a sentence. Duh, thanks.
@2xsaiko @TehPers there’s other examples too. E.g. Thai has no spaces between words but spaces between phrases/sentences. However the spaces between phrases involve style choices similar to comma in English and many other Latin script writing systems. Also, Thai may have spaces around abbreviations special characters.
I’m quite familiar with Thai so that’s close at hand but I guess it’s the same in a lot of other writing systems based on Brahmic scripts.
Interesting, thanks!
“splitting on end-of-sentence punctuation” would not split on 8.9 though!?
Periods, question marks, and exclamation points are end-of-sentence punctuation. Splitting on those would split on 8.9.
Even if you wrote a magical split function that always split at the ends of sentences, you can quote multiple sentences in the middle of a sentence:
Basically programmers should not try to write their own sentence splitting function (unless they’re writing a library for that or something, like a natural language parser).