I do not know chinese, but I'll take Roger's word that the whitespace still has some significance there.
[Replying in chat, also] Thanks, -- Raul On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 10:17 PM, Skip Cave <[email protected]> wrote: > Raul, > > Who said that ASCII English was ideal? > > Here's the sentence "I do not see why this should be an ideal" in Mandarin. > > 我不明白為什麼這應該是一個理想的 > > And here's the same sentence again in Mandarin, with different spacing, but > with the same meaning. . > > 我不明 白為 什 麼這 應該 是 一 個理想的 > > And here's the same sentence again in Mandarin, with even different > spacing, yet with the same meaning. > > 我 不明白 為什 麼這 應該 是 一個 理 想 的 > > So true single-glyph symbolic languages are space-independent, and that's a > GOOD thing for writing. Your example shows why languages that use > multi-glyph words or symbols like English and J and thus are NOT space > independent, are a BAD thing for handwriting. > > When you write your sentence on the board in English, you have to be > careful to clearly indicate where the spaces are, or you get what you > showed in your first example. With a single-glyph languager like Chinese, > the spaces don't matter much. > > Skip > > On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 7:12 AM, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 6:02 AM, Skip Cave <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> > Ideally a written version of the language should be space-independent. >> >> Id ono ts eew hyt hi ssh oul db ea nid e al. >> >> I do not see why this should be an ideal. >> >> -- >> Raul >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm >> > > > > -- > Skip Cave > Cave Consulting LLC > Phone: 214-460-4861 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
