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:
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.
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
> Two other gentlemen have expressed different opinions on what the space between words should be.
Yeah, that's just weird. Just two, both gentlemen? Is having an opinion about laying out text a chivalrous aristocratic old boy's club? Are there other alternative styles of laying out text that are more "ladylike"? Does this em-dash make me look fat?
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"?
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.
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.
I actually like the interpunct way better (which I first saw when I visited Italy and saw historical carvings): instead⸱of⸱putting⸱spaces⸱you⸱put⸱a⸱small⸱dot⸱between⸱words⸱instead.
There are different Unicode characters though so be careful. Some allow browsers to break at the dot, others are non-breaking so the browser will consider it a single word.
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
This is about the use of void in art, specifically the perception of beauty and care that comes from the artist taking time to focus the eye of the viewer onto particular zones.
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”
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.)
> 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:
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?
The entire English language is a series of unambiguous errors that have been rescued by the popularity of the mistake. Were it not, we would be speaking some version of Ur-German.
That's just survivorship bias on a very long timeframe: Given enough time everything accumulates the status of "historical mistake", but what about the hundreds of thousands of words that didn't change and the days they didn't change in? Quite reasonably, we just don't pay attention to the mistakes that were squelched or whose trajectory never broke the ceiling of temporary slang.
There are some analogies to biology. Virtually all our DNA is the result of an error at some point (barring creationist theories) but that backstory isn't a reason to dismiss concerns against (or even for) a particular mutation. Surely nobody would downplay the drop of 3 base-pairs as "acktually normal when you look at the big picture for our species" when talking to people suffering from Cystic Fibrosis.
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.
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.
> Word spacing [creates] what Paul Sänger, 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.
For me as a Japanese language learner, it works fine so long as the text uses enough kanji. I've tried reading some Japanese-language books meant for kids around age 10, and the sentences that have 20 hiragana in a row can be killer. If a sentence uses both grammar you don't know and vocabulary you don't know, then how the heck are you supposed to figure out where each word begins and ends so you can look things up in a dictionary?
E.g. さっきまでは、心ぼそくてなきだしそうなのを、ひっしにこらえていたリナだったが、いまはまいごにまちがえられたことに、はらをたてていた。
With e.g. まちがえられた you could parse it as 間違えられた or 町が得られた and you can only tell the difference through context and intuition, which a learner of the language might lack. Even being able to recognize は and に as particles, rather than parts of the nearby words, requires context and/or guessing.
Kanji makes it a lot easier to figure out where words begin and end. Nouns are often written entirely in kanji, while adjectives and verbs are usually written with kanji at the beginning and hiragana for the parts that are conjugated (the ends, in both cases). A switch from hiragana to kanji usually means a word boundary, while kanji to hiragana can go either way.
> I've tried reading some Japanese-language books meant for kids around age 10...
I’m not sure at what target age kids’ books stop using word spacing, but books for younger children generally use it. Nevertheless, if you are used to seeing words written in kanji, even with word spacing an all-hiragana text can still trip you up, for the reasons you noted.
Side comment: Something I haven’t seen remarked on much is how Japanese can be easier for small children to start reading than English is because of the nearly one-to-one correspondence between character and sound for kana. My two daughters and now my six-year-old grandson have all grown up with Japanese as their first language, and they all started reading hiragana-only children’s books earlier and more easily than I, at least, learned to read English when I was a child. My grandson has also picked up katakana on his own; he is into dinosaurs and his picture books give the names of dinosaurs in katakana.
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.
Let's have a thread about the other article mentioned below. doener posted it here:
Manual: Spaces - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46199530
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
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.
Nah, that was just sloppy.
Dashes article is ok though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash
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!
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.
I've adjusted or removed those sentences in the article.
thankyou!!
> Two other gentlemen have expressed different opinions on what the space between words should be.
Yeah, that's just weird. Just two, both gentlemen? Is having an opinion about laying out text a chivalrous aristocratic old boy's club? Are there other alternative styles of laying out text that are more "ladylike"? Does this em-dash make me look fat?
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"?
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.
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.
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
I actually like the interpunct way better (which I first saw when I visited Italy and saw historical carvings): instead⸱of⸱putting⸱spaces⸱you⸱put⸱a⸱small⸱dot⸱between⸱words⸱instead.
Nowadays I only see/use the middle dot to cla⸱ri⸱fy syl⸱la⸱bles in lyr⸱ics.
Oh, nice! I've been using '-'s, but I'm going to switch.
There are different Unicode characters though so be careful. Some allow browsers to break at the dot, others are non-breaking so the browser will consider it a single word.
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
I also prefer that and in fact I enable "visible whitespace" in every text editor that supports it, such as VS Code.
Why would you use visible noise for something that should be void
Why should it be void?
Look into this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(negative_space)
This is about the use of void in art, specifically the perception of beauty and care that comes from the artist taking time to focus the eye of the viewer onto particular zones.
It has nothing to do with text legibility.
This is still the standard in setting Ethiopic text
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
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.
http://communitiesofnativespeakerscantbewrongaboutwhatwordsm...
I'll add "factoid."
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.)
> 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
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?
The entire English language is a series of unambiguous errors that have been rescued by the popularity of the mistake. Were it not, we would be speaking some version of Ur-German.
That's just survivorship bias on a very long timeframe: Given enough time everything accumulates the status of "historical mistake", but what about the hundreds of thousands of words that didn't change and the days they didn't change in? Quite reasonably, we just don't pay attention to the mistakes that were squelched or whose trajectory never broke the ceiling of temporary slang.
There are some analogies to biology. Virtually all our DNA is the result of an error at some point (barring creationist theories) but that backstory isn't a reason to dismiss concerns against (or even for) a particular mutation. Surely nobody would downplay the drop of 3 base-pairs as "acktually normal when you look at the big picture for our species" when talking to people suffering from Cystic Fibrosis.
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.
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
> Word spacing [creates] what Paul Sänger, 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.
Weird that only Latin, Greek, and Irish is mentioned in the article.
Also English. ("In English, the ability to ...")
Via https://noc.social/@todayilearned/115665925876659478
Japanese does not have spaces between words and it works just fine. ^_^
For me as a Japanese language learner, it works fine so long as the text uses enough kanji. I've tried reading some Japanese-language books meant for kids around age 10, and the sentences that have 20 hiragana in a row can be killer. If a sentence uses both grammar you don't know and vocabulary you don't know, then how the heck are you supposed to figure out where each word begins and ends so you can look things up in a dictionary?
E.g. さっきまでは、心ぼそくてなきだしそうなのを、ひっしにこらえていたリナだったが、いまはまいごにまちがえられたことに、はらをたてていた。
With e.g. まちがえられた you could parse it as 間違えられた or 町が得られた and you can only tell the difference through context and intuition, which a learner of the language might lack. Even being able to recognize は and に as particles, rather than parts of the nearby words, requires context and/or guessing.
Kanji makes it a lot easier to figure out where words begin and end. Nouns are often written entirely in kanji, while adjectives and verbs are usually written with kanji at the beginning and hiragana for the parts that are conjugated (the ends, in both cases). A switch from hiragana to kanji usually means a word boundary, while kanji to hiragana can go either way.
> I've tried reading some Japanese-language books meant for kids around age 10...
I’m not sure at what target age kids’ books stop using word spacing, but books for younger children generally use it. Nevertheless, if you are used to seeing words written in kanji, even with word spacing an all-hiragana text can still trip you up, for the reasons you noted.
Side comment: Something I haven’t seen remarked on much is how Japanese can be easier for small children to start reading than English is because of the nearly one-to-one correspondence between character and sound for kana. My two daughters and now my six-year-old grandson have all grown up with Japanese as their first language, and they all started reading hiragana-only children’s books earlier and more easily than I, at least, learned to read English when I was a child. My grandson has also picked up katakana on his own; he is into dinosaurs and his picture books give the names of dinosaurs in katakana.
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.
And then 7 centuries later, whiskey came about and look how terrible things turned out.............
I'm told that things took a turn for the worse in 1649.