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Hmmmm.... I'm german. It is unusual to do that. In the german part of the usenet this (using unnecessary spaces) has a specific term. Is called 'plenken' and undesirable. You will also never see this in german books. It's just a mistake like using the ' in wrong places as in 'Fritz's Schuhe'. Usually the ' stands for 1 or more omitted characters. The right diction is 'Fritzs Schuhe'. Unfortunately the number of people writing wrong german is growing.

Btw.: I've never learned 'traditional' American. Just English :banana:

Regards

MAT

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:banana:

I may have an answer ... as a French man using Microsoft Word, when I type "Bonjour?" , the software tells me that I should type "Bonjour !"

As a matter of fact, that is common French punctuation. I guess it might be the same in German ... though I am not fully sure!

Just a habit of reading in our own own language :drunk:

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Lol, I'm Flemish (so I also speak Dutch) and haven't seen Dutch/German people doing it more than anyone else. Can't be because we aren't trained well enough in our spelling. Dutch is such a hard language in terms of grammar that we're trained very severely in it. I bet some Dutch people know the dt-mistake, if you would make one like that in an essay you'll loose 25% of your marks for each one, so four of those = 0 :banana:

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  • 2 weeks later...

That's right. Europeans use the , as a . and the . as a ,. Is that clear :D?

So 10.02 (American) would be 10,02 in Europe. And 10,000 (10000) can be written as 10.000 here (10000). It comes from the time, that the Americans fought themselves free from the Britons. They wanted to show they were their own boss, so they exchanged the , and the ..

It is the same with driving left or right. Napoleon made a law that said all people should drive right. The English though "He is a idiot, but that idea isn't that bad." so they imitated it, but they changed it to driving left, to show their independance. So guess what happened when America gained independance (y)? They changed it to driving right, because they hated the English then.

I think it is about time to generalise all standards globally. Same with measurements (meters, foot).

And about the "space" thing. It's computerlanguage I guess. I'm Dutch and it is standard to put the . or ! or ? at the end of a sentence without a space. However, when one is typing, you must remember that after each word, you would automatically place a space, so it could be a "blind-typing" issue.

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The English though "He is a idiot, but that idea isn't that bad." so they imitated it, but they changed it to driving left, to show their independance.

What I heard is it depended where they sat on the carriage. If they sat left it was standardized to driving left because then you couldn't hit the pedestrians with your whip (y)

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Moreover Napoleon could make that law only "after" the American Indipendence War, even if France and the U.S. were allied for most of the napoleonic wars period...

Why could he only make that law after that war?

@Klaas: that's what I was thaught, so blame my history teacher for that. Anyway, it could be because of both that reasons.

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Moreover Napoleon could make that law only "after" the American Indipendence War, even if France and the U.S. were allied for most of the napoleonic wars period...

Why could he only make that law after that war?

@Klaas: that's what I was thaught, so blame my history teacher for that. Anyway, it could be because of both that reasons.

Because the American Independence wars were fought starting from 1774 to 1777 (IIRC), wether Napoleon siezed power in 1799: in 1777 he was pretty young. (y)

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