🚀 go-pugleaf

Michael Farris wrote:
> 
> qinjingyou@yahoo.com (djinn) wrote in message news:<5a546924.0312261234.2e3221b6@posting.google.com>...
> > "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
> > > Maybe those are readers for learners? Thai writes whole phrases and
> > > clauses closed up (but Michael Farris just said that the breaks _don't_
> > > necessarily correspond to phrase or clause boundaries, which seems weird
> > > to me).
> >
> > can't say for Thai, but in Khmer the breaks do seem to correspond to
> > phrases. There aren't normally breaks between words. People definitely
> > do read silently.
> 
> Well to be perfectly clear, breaks in Thai texts often do correspond
> to clause breaks but also often enough, for printing reasons, a break
> needs to be made elsewhere in which case the break is a little random,

Why would you "need" to break elsewhere than a line end?

> I was working on pronouncing a short text with a native and when he
> read it out loud he was grouping elements together rather differently
> than the breaks in the printed text suggested.
> Also sometimes breaks seem to be put in on conventional grounds that
> don't necessarily correspond to phrase breaks, the reduplication sign
> seems to always be followed by a break even though the reduplicated
> element may not be at the end of a phrase and lae: (and) is often
> preceded by a break.

Or are these two cases what you had in mind?

(Note that the "non-connecting" letters in Arabic don't connect, but
they don't trigger something like a word break after them. OTOH there
aren't many perceptible word breaks, because word boundaries are
signaled by final forms, or by the set of letters that occur only
finally, notably taa' marbuta and alif maqsura.)

(Part of the reason it's not so easy to read a Kufic Qur'an is that the
distinction between inter- and intra-word spaces is usually not (yet?)
observed.)
-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net