🚀 go-pugleaf

"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message news:<3FE9ECDB.2DAC@worldnet.att.net>...
> Harlan Messinger wrote:
> > 
> > "The Other" <other@no.email.pls> wrote in message
> >> > > > > Was this such a difficult thing that needed to be "invented"?
> > >
> > > Becauseitwashardtodiscernthewordswithoutspacesseparatingthem.
> > > Apparently, silent reading became widespread when books started being
> > > written with spaces between words. _Space Between Words: The Origin of
> > > Silent Reading_ by Paul Saenger has been recommended here on
> > > rec.arts.books.
> > 
> > So in Thailand everybody still reads out loud?
> 
> Not to mention China and Japan. At least in Thailand you get the
> occasional word space.

But spaces in Thai rarely have to do anything. That they're not
necessarily (or even usually according to some sources) based on
natural breaks between words or clauses.

And Vietnamese uses spaces not between words but between syllables
(often even in monomorphemic multisyllable words).

In Japanese, the alternation of kanji and kana does provide some idea
of phrase boundaries without spaces.

Korean though (at least in the South) does seem to use something like
word or phrase spaces in all hangul texts.

-michael farris