[HN Gopher] Word spacing
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Word spacing
Author : doener
Score : 35 points
Date : 2025-12-05 08:08 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| doener wrote:
| Via https://noc.social/@todayilearned/115665925876659478
| m4rtink wrote:
| Japanese does not have spaces between words and it works just
| fine. ^_^
| dhosek wrote:
| Ditto with Thai, Chinese, Lao, etc. I think Korean is the
| only east-asian script which uses word spacing. Given the
| late introduction of word spacing into writing, it's almost
| more a surprise that scripts have it than don't.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I actually like the interpunct way better (which I first saw when
| I visited Italy and saw historical carvings): instead[?]of[?]putt
| ing[?]spaces[?]you[?]put[?]a[?]small[?]dot[?]between[?]words[?]in
| stead.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Nowadays I only see/use the middle dot to cla[?]ri[?]fy
| syl[?]la[?]bles in lyr[?]ics.
| mrsvanwinkle wrote:
| I love that better! I was also just in Italy recently and you
| made me double take this tablet hanging on a canopy in one of
| the peregrination churches and they ARE interpuncts but for
| names only
| dhosek wrote:
| This is still the standard in setting Ethiopic text
| piskov wrote:
| Why would you use visible noise for something that should be
| void
| vntok wrote:
| Why should it be void?
| piskov wrote:
| Look into this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(negative_space)
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| This is fascinating! At the same time, this wikipedia article is
| of surprisingly low quality, with sentences like
|
| > 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.
| contingencies wrote:
| Exactly the same sentences grated here. It is the subjective
| passed off as the objective, passed on with a tone of false
| authority. A surprisingly large majority of public
| communications fall in to this category. Mastering this
| puffery, usually for the express purpose of swaying the wills
| of lesser minds or pressing buttons in funding and grant
| processes, grants you the reigns of bureaucracy and a career in
| corporate, public or international relations. A horrible way to
| waste a life.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I thought it was weirdly written, too. Why is the CSS property
| that controls it worth mentioning in the opening paragraph, and
| wtf is "standardized digital typography"?
| msuniverse2026 wrote:
| Weird that only Latin, Greek, and Irish is mentioned in the
| article.
| eesmith wrote:
| Also English. ("In English, the ability to ...")
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Related self promotion: this factoid about spaces, along with
| other fun slices in the evolution of writing, features in my
| decade-ago Ignite talk "For the love of letters"
|
| https://youtu.be/g1Rko-LG6aY?si=SbLDRnORPnKiXCxu
| Terr_ wrote:
| Since we're already being picky about languages, that's not a
| factoid: Factoids are things which _resemble_ facts, but aren
| 't actually facts.
|
| 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.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > Factoids are things which resemble facts, but aren't
| actually facts.
|
| 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
| Terr_ wrote:
| Yeah, but that's the same lax descriptivist school that
| also tell you "literally" and "I could care less" should
| somehow be accepted as the exact opposites, they're just
| wrong. :p
|
| 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?
| aspenmayer wrote:
| As we don't have an official or authoritative body that
| determines "proper" English usage as other languages do,
| appealing to a dictionary strikes me as a mite better
| than prescriptivism or pedantry, though I don't think was
| your intention either.
|
| > 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.
| mkehrt wrote:
| http://communitiesofnativespeakerscantbewrongaboutwhatwordsm.
| ..
|
| I'll add "factoid."
| Terr_ wrote:
| Hypocrisy: You're just claiming a _different_ community of
| native speakers are wrong.
|
| 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.)
| retentionissue wrote:
| And then 7 centuries later, whiskey came about and look how
| terrible things turned out.............
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| I'm told that things took a turn for the worse in 1649.
| delichon wrote:
| > Word spacing [creates] what Paul Sanger, in his book The Spaces
| between the Words, refers to as aerated text.
|
| 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.
| sempron64 wrote:
| This is for Latin. The Dead Sea Scrolls have clear spacing
| between the words. https://www.imj.org.il/en/wings/shrine-
| book/dead-sea-scrolls
|
| The Talmud discusses the spacing between the words of the Bible:
| https://www.bible-researcher.com/hebrewtext1.html
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| OT: Urdu, like Arabic/Persian, is written with an alphabet where
| letters can change shape based on whether they are at the start,
| middle or end of a "word" [1]. I say "word" because some letters
| don't have a middle form, so each actual word is broken into a
| sequence of composite-letter-shapes, where each composite shape
| start with such a no-middle-form letter.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu_alphabet
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_non-joiner
| piskov wrote:
| Instead of that sorry excuse of an article, here is the proper
| long-read about spaces.
|
| 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:
|
| https://youtube.com/shorts/IrhFP67-_vA?si=n9UICaRQ9ZiUyVuT
| derleyici wrote:
| FYI, you don't even need browser translation. The piece already
| has an English version available. There's a language toggle in
| the navigation bar, and the English version is here:
| https://type.today/en/journal/spaces
|
| Also, liked the article!
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Wikipedia articles, and encyclopedia articles in general, are
| not meant to be "proper long-read" articles. They're meant to
| be short, descriptive passages that give you enough of an
| overview to know _what_ the subject is, and directions on where
| to find more information should you want it. This is not a
| sorry excuse, it 's just the nature of what an encyclopedia is.
| piskov wrote:
| Nah, that was just sloppy.
|
| Dashes article is ok though:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash
| ralferoo wrote:
| There's lots of questionable stuff on this page. I particularly
| objected to this which clearly isn't true in most English speech:
|
| "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.
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(page generated 2025-12-08 23:01 UTC)