alt Hacker NewsWord spacing
Comments
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.
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.
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”
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.
Weird that only Latin, Greek, and Irish is mentioned in the article.
And then 7 centuries later, whiskey came about and look how terrible things turned out.............
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