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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3596 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 4, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Can you, from errors made by an ESL person when communicating in English, deduce their native language?

If I see a person put a space before a colon, question mark, or exclamation mark, then I assume that that person's native language is French. I don't know whether any languages other than French employ the same practice, though.

According to the Unicode CLDR (assuming the space character in the "localeKeyTypePattern" before the colon is the same as the space before the question mark, I'm too lazy to search around for the real spec location), Occitan and Breton does so too, somewhat unsurprisingly. The only other one that does is Adlam – a script used to write Fulani, a Senegambian language. Now that'd be a hard trivia question!

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