Category Archives: Language

Posts on language. Although I may be found wanting since most of the old material is in Swedish, and being the “punful” guy I am, mostly not possible to translate…

Computers and Internet, Humor, Language

Swedish Apple Spell

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How Swedish spell checking in Apple Spell apparently was created:

Apple: Give us a list of correctly spelled Swedish words.
Swedish language professor: What do you need it for?
Apple: We’re doing spell checking.
Professor: Oh, you can’t do it like that.
Apple: We’re Apple! We can do anything!
Professor (making a joke list): Here, make spell checking with this.

Apple Spell just marked “spådan” (a misspelled “sådan”) a correct word in Swedish.

I mean. Sure, it is a correct Swedish word (a compound of “spå”—fortune-telling, and “dan”—the day… so, “the fortune-telling day”).

I tried to Google it, but was unable. It defaulted to “spådam” (fortune-teller) which ever way I tried to make it not. (Coincidentally, this is also a compound of “spå” and “dam”—lady… Swedish do compounds galore!)

What pisses me off most is that this ungoogleable compound exists in this shit spell checking but not some very very very common ones, like:

  • Lättstörd—easily disturbed (e.g. sleep)
  • Maglevtåg—maglev train
  • Obäddad—unmade (bed)
  • Prästinnorna—the priestesses
  • And several thousand other words that are not conlang words I have in my local dictionary (currently at 3536 words… I may be a prolific conlanger… but no, not that prolific)

That’s why I think Apple Spell is the result of a Swedish language professor jokingly showing Apple that, no, you can’t do anything even if you think so.

And no, I know what you think. Why don’t you install a Hunspell dictionary? WHY DON’T YOU TRY TO INSTALL ONE? You’d be one of a handful having tried and failed, and none of those people work at Apple.

Microsoft Word may not be good for much when it comes to fiction writing, but it does do Swedish spell-checking about a million times better than Apple Spell.

Humor, Language

Fear the umlaut

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Many years ago, I was working in a project with two programmers from London. These guys, being monolingual, were of the firm conviction that your verbal proficiency indicated competence, intelligence and ability to deal with… well language.

They called my attempts at English “Yoda English” so when the time came to add texts to the app we were building one of the Brits were put on the task.

The customer was not happy.

See, the language in question was not English but Swedish and having someone that didn’t understand a single word of Swedish do the language management produced one of my favorite misspellings of a Swedish word.

The guy had entered “gödkanna” where he should have entered “godkänna”.

Godkänna means “approve” or “confirm”.

Gödkanna doesn’t really exist in a dictionary, but it is a grammatically correct word since it’s possible to construct compound words in many different ways in Swedish (yes every writing app programmer on planet Earth, you heard me right! If you want to create a list of all possible Swedish words aspell-style, it’ll probably be a pretty long list—like listing all possible positive integers…—the local dictionary on my Mac currently contains a whopping 3404 “unknown” Swedish words… 😐)

Anyway, “gödkanna” is a compound of “göd” here used as a prefix relating to “göda” meaning fertilize and “kanna” meaning can/pitcher.

Fertilizer can.

A can of shit?

(As a parenthesis; at this writing, Google Translate suggests “manure can” as a translation of “gödkanna”…)

The customer being in Telecom, it is correct to assume they did not want to pay for a can of manure…