Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
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
My bad. I was thinking some of the ancient languages.
<Excerpt from link above>
None Alphabetic writing without interword separation is sometimes known
as scripta continua. This is or was typical for Ancient Egyptian,
Ancient Greek language, Ancient Latin (after the interpunct period,
until 600AD-800AD), Chinese, and Japanese.
</Excerpt from link above>
<An even better excerpt from link above>
Rediscovery of spaces in Latin
The Irish appear to have been the first to consistently use blank spaces
to delimit word boundaries in the Latin alphabet, sometime between 600
AD and 800 AD. As Irish is from a different branch of the Indo-European
language family than Latin, the Irish would have had much more
difficulty reading Latin than people with, for example, Spanish or
Italian (which descended from Latin and are still quite close to it) as
their first language. Thus they would have had greater incentive to make
reading Latin easier.
</An even better excerpt from link above>
In this example, it appears that breaks between words was a convention
to make an unfamiliar language easier to read, which reinforces my point
that: breaks, between, spoken, words, makes, an,
unfamiliar, spoken, language, easier, to, hear.
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