English disease

[rhialto]

Somebody just mentioned http://www.spatiegebruik.nl and my language police heart (in Dutch: taalpolitiehart) jumped with joy! A website about the horrible tendency of people to incorrectly write dutch compound words separately. This mistake is also called the English Disease, because of the influence of English, and English doesn't really know compounds (except in some very limited cases, perhaps a word like keyboard started as a combination of key and board). In Dutch however, the heart of a member of the language police is called a taalpolitiehart and not a taal politie hart, because grammatically that would make taal and police adjectives (and those words cannot even be adjectives). In other cases it would change the meaning: a familie zwembad is not a swimming pool for the whole family, but a family named Zwembad (and with the different meaning there comes the different distribution of stress over the syllables)...