this isn't a complete illustrative example of what you refer to, but even still in some languages this is still today a certain extent true. some finnish words have all sorts of grammar built into them, yet are still considered one word: ikä = age ikävä = miss (you), too bad ikävystyä = to miss someone, be bored ikävystyneisyys = boredom ikävystyneisyydessä = in boredom ikävystynesyydessäänkään = not even in his boredeom ...
that is for me a funny example, but not at all extreme. German has a lot of compound words that have no spaces. Finnish, too. My example was a single "word" but I could have made it longer by compounding it. Lindy -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Bill Fairchild Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 12:44 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Parsing (was: "New" way to do UCB lookups) Typically in modern languages the vowel points, diacritic markings, syllabic stress markers, etc., are only used in printed works that are used by beginning learners of those languages. Being a beginning learner in Greek once again (and this time no drop-out), I have happily discovered that modern Greek texts atypically have syllabic stress markers in each word. My Latin teacher told me the same thing 50+ years ago - that punctuation, inter-word spacing, capitalization, etc., were never necessary until people stopped thinking. Delving into other languages is a good way to expand one's horizons and diminish one's provinciality. Like anything else we learn to do, I would wager that reading and writing in any language without punctuation, capitalization, and spacing would get much easier after the first few thousand hours of practice. :-) Bill Fairchild Programmer Rocket Software 408 Chamberlain Park Lane * Franklin, TN 37069-2526 * USA t: +1.617.614.4503 * e: bfairch...@rocketsoftware.com * w: www.rocketsoftware.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
