Ralph Shumaker wrote:
Barry Gershenfeld wrote:
Say, exactly, the, same, thing, with, clear, breaks,
in, between, each, word.
And it's amazing how quickly they get it.
This is the point in the discussion where I point out that Morse code is
often taught this way, with longer spaces between characters, but the
characters themselves not stretched out. Thus, one learns to hear the
proper sound of the characters as they appear normally.
On the flip side, I'm sure the reason why spaces didn't used to exist in
writing is that they typically don't exist in speech. But inflections
and such didn't exist in print either, even though it *clearly* does in
speech. I'm betting that the conventions of punctuation and such came
about to try to approximate it.
idonotknowwhocameupwiththebrightideatoputspacesbetweenwordsbutiamtrulygratefulthatitcaughton.
Actually, many languages indicate interword separation (even Latin did
originally! It was called an interpunct). See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interword_separation
This is one of the big challenges in learning how to read Japanese
(which does *not* delineate between words via typography). A lot of
people try to deal with either Romanized or Hiragana/Katakana only and
fail very hard.
The problem is that the Kanji provide a lot of word break metadata. A
shift from hiragana/katakana back to Kanji almost always indicates the
beginning of a new word.
Even native speakers of Japanese have to think when faced with an
unbroken stream of hiragana--just like English speakers have to think
when faced with an unbroken stream of letters.
-a
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