It has nothing to do with text legibility.
> 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.
Yeah, that's just weird. Just two, both gentlemen? Is having an opinion about laying out text a chivalrous aristocratic old boy's club? Are there other alternative styles of laying out text that are more "ladylike"? Does this em-dash make me look fat?
The whole -oid suffix, really. 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.
I think you might be right but not definitively so: the Oxford dictionary has your definition, as does the New Oxford American dictionary which also lists the following as North American usage:
> a brief or trivial item of news or information
Is it equally accepted for "peoples" to be possessive and "people's" to be plural? At what point does something that began as an unambiguous error become rescued by the popularity of the mistake?
> Is it equally accepted for "peoples" to be possessive and "people's" to be plural?
That’s entirely unrelated and uncontroversial; one is the plural of a “people,” as in multiple distinct groups of folks with shared culture, nationality, or other traits, whereas the other is the possessive form of a word that is already plural, so I’m not sure if that’s a red herring or if you’ve actually seen such incorrect usage being advocated for.
There are some analogies to biology. Virtually all our DNA is the result of an error at some point (barring creationist theories) but that backstory isn't a reason to dismiss concerns against (or even for) a particular mutation. Surely nobody would downplay the drop of 3 base-pairs as "acktually normal when you look at the big picture for our species" when talking to people suffering from Cystic Fibrosis.
I'll add "factoid."
For some of the samples on that site, it'd question whether they even have majority-support as "correct" when brought to people's conscious attention, as opposed to simply being a popular mistake they don't object-to. (Do any polls exist? The nature of the content evades easy search-terms.)
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.
The Talmud discusses the spacing between the words of the Bible: https://www.bible-researcher.com/hebrewtext1.html
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.
Albeit in Russian, all modern browsers support live translation — should be fine.
https://type.today/ru/journal/spaces
Update: in English https://type.today/en/journal/spaces
—
BTW typography is very important to Russian designers and developers.
Many install special typography layout (with “right alt” layer for the symbols) to always enter correct m-dashes, quotes, and what have you.
https://ilyabirman.ru/typography-layout/
There is even an ongoing meme with a woman crying “I don’t deserve such treatment, that’s how I’ve always written” when her flawless typography was considered ChatGPT in the making:
Also, liked the article!
Dashes article is ok though:
"Word spacing is crucial for the written form because it illustrates the sound of speech where audible gaps or pauses take place."
If I were reading it aloud, even for a presentation, the spaces between morphemes would be more like this:
"Wordspacing iscru'cial forthewri'ttenform be'cause itill'ustrates thesoun'dofspeech where audiblegaps or pauses takeplace."
where a ' is a shorted pause than a space. The length of the ' isn't really long enough to be called out as a pause, but it's definitely longer than between words which frequently run directly into the next.
Spacing is important, but it's as an aid to parsing a written sentence at speed, and almost nothing to do with showing the pauses between morphemes.
Manual: Spaces - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46199530
I was once reading a paperback novel in which one chapter ended on an almost entirely blank page with just one character that didn't fit into the previous page. That character was 。(the Japanese sentence-ending period).
It can happen that matters that people in one culture punctiliously obsess about don't mean a thing in another culture.
doener•2mo ago
m4rtink•2mo ago
dhosek•2mo ago
meatmanek•2mo ago
E.g. さっきまでは、心ぼそくてなきだしそうなのを、ひっしにこらえていたリナだったが、いまはまいごにまちがえられたことに、はらをたてていた。
With e.g. まちがえられた you could parse it as 間違えられた or 町が得られた and you can only tell the difference through context and intuition, which a learner of the language might lack. Even being able to recognize は and に as particles, rather than parts of the nearby words, requires context and/or guessing.
Kanji makes it a lot easier to figure out where words begin and end. Nouns are often written entirely in kanji, while adjectives and verbs are usually written with kanji at the beginning and hiragana for the parts that are conjugated (the ends, in both cases). A switch from hiragana to kanji usually means a word boundary, while kanji to hiragana can go either way.
tkgally•2mo ago
I’m not sure at what target age kids’ books stop using word spacing, but books for younger children generally use it. Nevertheless, if you are used to seeing words written in kanji, even with word spacing an all-hiragana text can still trip you up, for the reasons you noted.
Side comment: Something I haven’t seen remarked on much is how Japanese can be easier for small children to start reading than English is because of the nearly one-to-one correspondence between character and sound for kana. My two daughters and now my six-year-old grandson have all grown up with Japanese as their first language, and they all started reading hiragana-only children’s books earlier and more easily than I, at least, learned to read English when I was a child. My grandson has also picked up katakana on his own; he is into dinosaurs and his picture books give the names of dinosaurs in katakana.