The Joijs of Text Recognition

[muckefuck]

A co-worker called me over to help with a German reference request. What was a "lemende"? Neither she nor the patron could find it in any dictionary they'd consulted. "Context?" I asked. Some kind of profession. My co-worker had found the word Lehm ("clay") and wondered if it might be "potter", a suggestion I dismissed out of hand.

Googling was of little help. A sentence like "Der Lemende macht sich ein klares Bild über die Aufgabenstellung und das Lernziel" doesn't really give you much in the way of clues what occupation a "Lemende" might be. But I did notice one thing about many of the results: They tended to have obvious misspellings, which confirmed my suspicion that I was dealing with a nonexistant word.

I tried every obvious variant: Lehmende, Lämende, Lähmende, etc., still nothing. Then it hit me: Lernende! I'd been looking for mistakes a person might make, not ones that a machine might make. It wasn't a typo or a misspelling, rather a recognition error--probably a scan that hadn't been spellchecked. A native speaker probably would've picked up on it in a fraction of the time it took me, alas.

[Grammar Note for snowy_owlet: lernend is the present participle of lernen "to learn". Like almost any other German adjective, this can be substantivised. Der Lernende is "the one [grammatically masculine, but with common reference] who is learning". It's a useful cover term given that Student is restricted to those in higher education. I'm not sure why it's preferred to the straightforward agent noun Lerner "learner". Does that sound too old-fashioned?]

Comments

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

Oh, it IS old-fashioned! But I like that.

[sacundim.livejournal.com]

Hell, I'd make that mistake all the time if i had to transcribe text in a language i don't know, and the text was small enough.

[bengt.livejournal.com]

I use this old-fashioned formation a lot if I don't happen to know the actual word. Like for a person who steals, who would usually be a "Dieb" or "Räuber", I might forget it and use "der stehlende Mann". the stealing man. Although this could be misunderstood as "the stolen man", so maybe my example isn't perfect. But that's the KIND of thing...

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Nope, it couldn't; "the stolen man" is der gestohlene Mann with the past rather than the present participle, just as in English. When I get stuck for an agent noun, I tend to use relative clauses, e.g. der Mann, der stiehlt.

And I wasn't calling the present participle "old-fashioned". I was trying to explain the widespread recent formation der Lernende when der Lerner already exists and speculating that the latter sounds a bit dated, like the way "scholar" does in English.

[bengt.livejournal.com]

yes, it was just a bad example on my part, but I can't think of the one that I wanted. I also don't lke using relative clauses, because that can screw up my syntax something fierce...

*Lerner

[pne.livejournal.com]

A native speaker probably would've picked up on it in a fraction of the time it took me, alas.

Yep. As soon as I saw it in context, at any rate.

I'm not sure why it's preferred to the straightforward agent noun Lerner "learner". Does that sound too old-fashioned?

Don't know about old-fashioned, but it sounds really odd to this native speaker. "Der Lerner"? Hm, I think I'd give that an asterisk.

As for "Studierende(r)", you probably already know that some people like it because it's easier to be PC in the plural -- since the plural for both male (ein Studierender) and female (eine Studierende) is "Studierende" / "die Studierenden", so you avoid something like "die Studenten und Studentinnen" or the IMO ugly "die StudentInnen".

(Others are annoyed because "der Student" is someone who is enrolled in a university, while "der Studierende" -- being a present participle -- is "someone who is studying". So if you're at home having a beer with your friends, you're still a Student but not a Studierender, since you're not, at that point, studying.)