7 ms·

From a very quick cursory look, Japanese seems to have some sort of commas and periods. Shouldn't it be just simple to adopt spaces, (and proper commas and peri

From a very quick cursory look, Japanese seems to have some sort of commas and periods. Shouldn't it be just simple to adopt spaces, (and proper commas and periods and parentheses, which they actually use already) too?

corey_moncure 6y ago
Sort of but then no one can agree on things like whether particles are part of the word or not. To the fluent reader, the kanji/kana switching breaks up the text enough to lex it. I'm non-native and actually reading all-kana is much more difficult for me than the usual mixture. Many all-kana texts employ spaces. All-kana with no spaces is a nightmare.
- LikeAnElephant 6y ago
  Agree with this, then you come across a more philosophical debate: should the very nature of written language change to adapt to the needs of technology, or the other way around? On one hand, language has always been an amorphous thing and has changed throughout history. On the other could some changes change the very nature and heart of it? No one agrees on those trade-offs, and I argue likely never will.
  - Asooka 6y ago
    > should the very nature of written language change to adapt to the needs of technology This has been always the case. I mean, think of how modern latin letter forms developed. Think back to the Roman Empire, when the letters were etched in stone or wax tablets, with only capitals (before the invention of minuscule), drawn with straight lines that are easy to chisel. Think of the later periods when many books were written by scribes using pen and ink, resulting in changes to letters so they could write entire words in one hand motion. Later still, we have the printing press and its demands that each letter be a discrete unit, doing away with the wavy flow of words. Today most people write using print letters simply because the majority of writing you would encounter is in print, so that's what's easiest to read. Those changes probably don't register to you as egregious as the one parent proposes, due to the fact that the person enforcing the change and the person developing the technology are one and the same - a native speaker modifying his own language to fit the tools at hand. Which I think brings us to a resolution - the native speakers of the language are the ones to decide how to change it to suit their everyday needs, including making it easier to produce and consume with the tools of the day.
    - LikeAnElephant 6y ago
      > Which I think brings us to a resolution - the native speakers of the language are the ones to decide how to change it to suit their everyday needs, including making it easier to produce and consume with the tools of the day. Agree with you here, it's well outside my rights as an English speaking American to have an opinion of any merit. However I would still struggle to call handing it over to native speakers a resolution. Many native speakers have incredibly strong feelings on both sides of the argument; and often for very good and valid reasons. I'm glad the Unicode Consortium exists, because I am CERTAIN I don't want to be the decider or facilitator of these discussions. Way above my pay grade.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > Think back to the Roman Empire, when the letters were etched in stone or wax tablets, with only capitals (before the invention of minuscule), drawn with straight lines that are easy to chisel. To choose some random capital Roman letters, how about... SPQR? Those got inscribed all the time. Roman letters don't really show any bias towards straight lines. Don't confuse the fact that we split the Roman letter V into two letters U/V with the idea that they didn't carve curved letters. Check out this awesome plaque from the year 90: https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-a-bronze-inscription-a-remnant-of-roman-might/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-a-bronze-inscription-a-remn...
      - earthboundkid 6y ago
        Interestingly, it’s easier for me to read that bronze plaque from the first century than a typical manuscript from the fifteenth century, in part because in the early modern period, there was a purposeful revival of the Roman inscription style for writing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_square_capitals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_square_capitals
  - knolax 6y ago
    If the Japanese language needs to change, it won't be because some Western developer found it too hard to develop some obscure unused highlighting feature for it. The HN crowd's fetishistic need to change everything for the sake developer convenience really reflects poorly on programmers as a profession.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > To the fluent reader, the kanji/kana switching breaks up the text enough to lex it. I'm non-native and actually reading all-kana is much more difficult for me than the usual mixture. Don't leap to conclusions about the benefit of breaking up the text. For example, reading Mandarin pinyin is much more difficult than reading characters, but neither of those involves a mixed script. (And heck, the pinyin might have word spacing! [1]) The reason is pretty obvious - characters contain a lot more than just phonetic information. That makes things harder on the writer, and easier on the reader. [1] Pinyin produced for foreign learners usually has word spacing. Pinyin produced for Chinese children usually doesn't.
Freak_NL 6y ago
You want to change a written language for the express purpose of enabling computers to be able to detect word boundaries easier?
- emilfihlman 6y ago
  It's just lighthearted pondering on the issue. Written language evolves, or is that only a standard applied to $YOUR_LANGUAGE when defending people not learning it? I think having spaces is useful, too, for learning speed and expression.
  - rafi_kamal 6y ago
    Similar argument also applies to English. English isn't phonetic which makes it hard to pronounce correctly unless you are learning from a native speaker. But I don't see written English to evolve in a way that makes it easier to pronounce for new learners.
    - mring33621 6y ago
      I'm a life-long English speaker and am 100% OK with changing the language to make it easier to learn.
      - zeroimpl 6y ago
        Let’s make phase 1 be the unification of American and British spelling. That should be easy enough right?
- Asooka 6y ago
  It's not entirely unprecedented. Modern cyrillic shapes are in part influenced by the printing press - when it was being imported in Russia, they didn't want to mill an entire new set of characters, so they repurposed the latin ones that look like cyrillic characters and only added the ones that were missing. Of course, parent's suggestion will never pass, as it will require everyone everywhere to start using spaces, which is more trouble than it's worth to native language users.
4bpp 6y ago
Who would be both interested in and able to champion such a change, though? Spaced Japanese text would look at least as jarring to someone who is used to its present state as English text following the German capitalization pattern (all Nouns to be capitalised in all Contexts) would to an English speaker, and I doubt the present anglophone world could be persuaded to adopt the latter change even if it turned out to convey immeasurable advantages to computational processing of text.
bluquark 6y ago
The squarish glyph-shapes aren't a good fit for spaces. Scripts with spaces have unevenly shaped letters so that one can quickly scan a word by its length and pattern of ascenders/descenders. In Japanese spaces do not aid this type of scanning, and conversely the uneven densities of the glyphs allow for fast scanning without the aid of spaces.
nayuki 6y ago
Spaces have been tried in Japanese. If you look at pure-kana (hiragana/katakana) texts aimed at grade schoolers and foreign language learners, there are spaces because without them there would be too much parsing ambiguity. Text with full kanji for adults do not use spaces, and this does not hurt comprehension at all.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > If you look at pure-kana (hiragana/katakana) texts aimed at grade schoolers and foreign language learners, there are spaces because without them there would be too much parsing ambiguity. This cannot actually be true; the spoken sentences do not indicate word breaks, but grade schoolers (and toddlers) can parse them just fine.
  - syockit 6y ago
    Because there are accents in spoken sentences. Now if you would include accent marks in the letters it might make it easier to parse. Sadly, as far as I know there are no standard accent marks for kana.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      While the prosodic contour of a sentence does help in parsing, there's a reason no writing system has ever taken notice of it. It's not necessary. The most obvious way to see this would be to think about synthesized speech, which almost never uses natural prosody. Think of the voice of Stephen Hawking, or just a splicing of some prerecorded options. ("At the tone, the time will be / TWO / TWENTY / THREE / and / TEN / seconds.")

corey_moncure 6y ago

Sort of but then no one can agree on things like whether particles are part of the word or not. To the fluent reader, the kanji/kana switching breaks up the text enough to lex it. I'm non-native and actually reading all-kana is much more difficult for me than the usual mixture. Many all-kana texts employ spaces. All-kana with no spaces is a nightmare.

LikeAnElephant 6y ago
Agree with this, then you come across a more philosophical debate: should the very nature of written language change to adapt to the needs of technology, or the other way around? On one hand, language has always been an amorphous thing and has changed throughout history. On the other could some changes change the very nature and heart of it? No one agrees on those trade-offs, and I argue likely never will.
- Asooka 6y ago
  > should the very nature of written language change to adapt to the needs of technology This has been always the case. I mean, think of how modern latin letter forms developed. Think back to the Roman Empire, when the letters were etched in stone or wax tablets, with only capitals (before the invention of minuscule), drawn with straight lines that are easy to chisel. Think of the later periods when many books were written by scribes using pen and ink, resulting in changes to letters so they could write entire words in one hand motion. Later still, we have the printing press and its demands that each letter be a discrete unit, doing away with the wavy flow of words. Today most people write using print letters simply because the majority of writing you would encounter is in print, so that's what's easiest to read. Those changes probably don't register to you as egregious as the one parent proposes, due to the fact that the person enforcing the change and the person developing the technology are one and the same - a native speaker modifying his own language to fit the tools at hand. Which I think brings us to a resolution - the native speakers of the language are the ones to decide how to change it to suit their everyday needs, including making it easier to produce and consume with the tools of the day.
  - LikeAnElephant 6y ago
    > Which I think brings us to a resolution - the native speakers of the language are the ones to decide how to change it to suit their everyday needs, including making it easier to produce and consume with the tools of the day. Agree with you here, it's well outside my rights as an English speaking American to have an opinion of any merit. However I would still struggle to call handing it over to native speakers a resolution. Many native speakers have incredibly strong feelings on both sides of the argument; and often for very good and valid reasons. I'm glad the Unicode Consortium exists, because I am CERTAIN I don't want to be the decider or facilitator of these discussions. Way above my pay grade.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > Think back to the Roman Empire, when the letters were etched in stone or wax tablets, with only capitals (before the invention of minuscule), drawn with straight lines that are easy to chisel. To choose some random capital Roman letters, how about... SPQR? Those got inscribed all the time. Roman letters don't really show any bias towards straight lines. Don't confuse the fact that we split the Roman letter V into two letters U/V with the idea that they didn't carve curved letters. Check out this awesome plaque from the year 90: https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-a-bronze-inscription-a-remnant-of-roman-might/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-a-bronze-inscription-a-remn...
    - earthboundkid 6y ago
      Interestingly, it’s easier for me to read that bronze plaque from the first century than a typical manuscript from the fifteenth century, in part because in the early modern period, there was a purposeful revival of the Roman inscription style for writing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_square_capitals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_square_capitals
- knolax 6y ago
  If the Japanese language needs to change, it won't be because some Western developer found it too hard to develop some obscure unused highlighting feature for it. The HN crowd's fetishistic need to change everything for the sake developer convenience really reflects poorly on programmers as a profession.
thaumasiotes 6y ago
> To the fluent reader, the kanji/kana switching breaks up the text enough to lex it. I'm non-native and actually reading all-kana is much more difficult for me than the usual mixture. Don't leap to conclusions about the benefit of breaking up the text. For example, reading Mandarin pinyin is much more difficult than reading characters, but neither of those involves a mixed script. (And heck, the pinyin might have word spacing! [1]) The reason is pretty obvious - characters contain a lot more than just phonetic information. That makes things harder on the writer, and easier on the reader. [1] Pinyin produced for foreign learners usually has word spacing. Pinyin produced for Chinese children usually doesn't.

Freak_NL 6y ago

You want to change a written language for the express purpose of enabling computers to be able to detect word boundaries easier?

emilfihlman 6y ago
It's just lighthearted pondering on the issue. Written language evolves, or is that only a standard applied to $YOUR_LANGUAGE when defending people not learning it? I think having spaces is useful, too, for learning speed and expression.
- rafi_kamal 6y ago
  Similar argument also applies to English. English isn't phonetic which makes it hard to pronounce correctly unless you are learning from a native speaker. But I don't see written English to evolve in a way that makes it easier to pronounce for new learners.
  - mring33621 6y ago
    I'm a life-long English speaker and am 100% OK with changing the language to make it easier to learn.
    - zeroimpl 6y ago
      Let’s make phase 1 be the unification of American and British spelling. That should be easy enough right?
Asooka 6y ago
It's not entirely unprecedented. Modern cyrillic shapes are in part influenced by the printing press - when it was being imported in Russia, they didn't want to mill an entire new set of characters, so they repurposed the latin ones that look like cyrillic characters and only added the ones that were missing. Of course, parent's suggestion will never pass, as it will require everyone everywhere to start using spaces, which is more trouble than it's worth to native language users.

4bpp 6y ago

Who would be both interested in and able to champion such a change, though? Spaced Japanese text would look at least as jarring to someone who is used to its present state as English text following the German capitalization pattern (all Nouns to be capitalised in all Contexts) would to an English speaker, and I doubt the present anglophone world could be persuaded to adopt the latter change even if it turned out to convey immeasurable advantages to computational processing of text.

bluquark 6y ago

The squarish glyph-shapes aren't a good fit for spaces. Scripts with spaces have unevenly shaped letters so that one can quickly scan a word by its length and pattern of ascenders/descenders. In Japanese spaces do not aid this type of scanning, and conversely the uneven densities of the glyphs allow for fast scanning without the aid of spaces.

nayuki 6y ago

Spaces have been tried in Japanese. If you look at pure-kana (hiragana/katakana) texts aimed at grade schoolers and foreign language learners, there are spaces because without them there would be too much parsing ambiguity. Text with full kanji for adults do not use spaces, and this does not hurt comprehension at all.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> If you look at pure-kana (hiragana/katakana) texts aimed at grade schoolers and foreign language learners, there are spaces because without them there would be too much parsing ambiguity. This cannot actually be true; the spoken sentences do not indicate word breaks, but grade schoolers (and toddlers) can parse them just fine.
- syockit 6y ago
  Because there are accents in spoken sentences. Now if you would include accent marks in the letters it might make it easier to parse. Sadly, as far as I know there are no standard accent marks for kana.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    While the prosodic contour of a sentence does help in parsing, there's a reason no writing system has ever taken notice of it. It's not necessary. The most obvious way to see this would be to think about synthesized speech, which almost never uses natural prosody. Think of the voice of Stephen Hawking, or just a splicing of some prerecorded options. ("At the tone, the time will be / TWO / TWENTY / THREE / and / TEN / seconds.")