Even if Dorfladen is not ambigous, it could be disturbing (and at first reading be understood as some obscure compound of -fladen.
Once I read a text, it used ligature (inappropriately) in the word Auflage 'obligation', which is compounded from the prefix auf- 'upon' -lage , a nominal derivative of 'to lay'. Anyway, it's one word with its own meaning. Because of that stupid ligature I read it twice as [ofla:ʒ], thinking it would be a yet-unknown French loanword, before finally realising it was simply Auflage. That mis-placed ligature really disturbed my reading flow, even though Auflage would not be ambiguous (like Dorfladen). /Sz On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 08:27, Stephan Stiller <[email protected]>wrote: > > But "Dorfladen" is not ambiguous. Asmus war referring to ambiguous cases > created by the way compound words are spelled in German. For those, some > user interaction is necessary, and it's my view that there are unobtrusive > ways of interacting with the user about this. > > (But then it needs to be acknowledged that ambiguous cases probably exist > or can be constructed in a lot of languages. And the frequency of such > ambiguity occurring in actual German text isn't that high. Even more so if > one takes into account the orthographic recommendation to use an explicit > hyphen in ambiguous cases. But of course these cases, if they occur, need to > be handled nevertheless.) > > Stephan > > >
