Mar 20
It's honestly tragic how little critical thought is utilised when people use machine generated stuff these days.
I die a little bit every time Instagram hits me with "[name] har føjet noget til vedkommendes historie", because I can assure you [name] did not do that. I am sure that "[name] har føjet noget til sin historie", but apparently Instagram couldn't be bothered to check whether a single line of machine translation that is a BIG part of the notifications they send to probably hundreds of thousands of users daily is actually correct Danish. They literally just need one person with a rudimentary understanding of Danish grammar to look at that for like 3 seconds, but clearly that's too much effort for them.
#that being said if you are a native danish speaker i would never judge you for mixing up hans/hendes/sin in daily speech#especially since it's an integral part of lots of dialects that are slowly being lost (if they aren't already lost because old people die)#because there's an expectation we should all talk like they do in copenhagen#but that's all moot. this is just me complaining about something that bothers me on a daily basis#dont get me wrong a lot of machine translations these days are REALLY good#but unfortunately whatever instagram used to translate didn't read the context correctly#there's also something to be said about whether 'vedkommende' is the best gender neutral strategy in Danish#but i know from fb and insta that meta has decided that it is#either way it's UGLY and WRONG if you want your app to be in standard danish and sin is a beautifully underrated word#reflexive possessive pronouns my beloveds (they are a big help if you consider the gay fanfiction problem too.......)#personal for ts#linguistics#grammar#danish#machine translation#instagram#so anyway this has bothered me for several years :)#and the zeitgeist is definitely ready for this take
