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The Joijs of Text Recognition
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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?]
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?]
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