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Word spacing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_spacing
24•doener•3d ago

Comments

doener•3d ago
Via https://noc.social/@todayilearned/115665925876659478
m4rtink•4m ago
Japanese does not have spaces between words and it works just fine. ^_^
kccqzy•50m ago
I actually like the interpunct way better (which I first saw when I visited Italy and saw historical carvings): instead⸱of⸱putting⸱spaces⸱you⸱put⸱a⸱small⸱dot⸱between⸱words⸱instead.
Terr_•25m ago
Nowadays I only see/use the middle dot to cla⸱ri⸱fy syl⸱la⸱bles in lyr⸱ics.
mrsvanwinkle•23m ago
I love that better! I was also just in Italy recently and you made me double take this tablet hanging on a canopy in one of the peregrination churches and they ARE interpuncts but for names only
pinkmuffinere•49m ago
This is fascinating! At the same time, this wikipedia article is of surprisingly low quality, with sentences like

> It is hard to determine how much spacing should be put in between words, but a good typographer is able to determine proper spacing.[3]

> Since the fifteenth century, the best work shows that text is to be read smoothly and efficiently.[4]

> Two other gentlemen have expressed different opinions on what the space between words should be.

contingencies•23m ago
Exactly the same sentences grated here. It is the subjective passed off as the objective, passed on with a tone of false authority. A surprisingly large majority of public communications fall in to this category. Mastering this puffery, usually for the express purpose of swaying the wills of lesser minds or pressing buttons in funding and grant processes, grants you the reigns of bureaucracy and a career in corporate, public or international relations. A horrible way to waste a life.
msuniverse2026•46m ago
Weird that only Latin, Greek, and Irish is mentioned in the article.
eesmith•18m ago
Also English. ("In English, the ability to ...")
wanderingstan•36m ago
Related self promotion: this factoid about spaces, along with other fun slices in the evolution of writing, features in my decade-ago Ignite talk “For the love of letters”

https://youtu.be/g1Rko-LG6aY?si=SbLDRnORPnKiXCxu

Terr_•24m ago
Since we're already being picky about languages, that's not a factoid: Factoids are things which resemble facts, but aren't actually facts.

Asteroids aren't really stars, meteoroids aren't really meteors, androids aren't really men, spheroids aren't really spheres, factoids aren't really facts, etc.

retentionissue•28m ago
And then 7 centuries later, whiskey came about and look how terrible things turned out.............
SideburnsOfDoom•25m ago
I'm told that things took a turn for the worse in 1649.
delichon•26m ago
> Word spacing [creates] what Paul Sänger, in his book The Spaces between the Words, refers to as aerated text.

I like that term. I particularly enjoy a large amount of ventilation of code, with plenty of breezy white spaces after purposely short lines and between brief declarations.

sempron64•18m ago
This is for Latin. The Dead Sea Scrolls have clear spacing between the words. https://www.imj.org.il/en/wings/shrine-book/dead-sea-scrolls

The Talmud discusses the spacing between the words of the Bible: https://www.bible-researcher.com/hebrewtext1.html

abdullahkhalids•18m ago
OT: Urdu, like Arabic/Persian, is written with an alphabet where letters can change shape based on whether they are at the start, middle or end of a "word" [1]. I say "word" because some letters don't have a middle form, so each actual word is broken into a sequence of composite-letter-shapes, where each composite shape start with such a no-middle-form letter.

A problem arises when one wants to write a compound word, which the last letter for the first word and the first letter of the second word must not be joined. To achieve this, the unicode standard has U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER character, which should be used in such compound words [2]. The standard SPACE character should not be used because it will create a physical space, while U+200C will create a break with no space.

However, typically Urdu keyboards don't have this character in them, so everyone ends up either using SPACE or just joining the words.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu_alphabet

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_non-joiner

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Word spacing

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