4 ms·

I never thought about this element of cross language structure before. Text direction, diacritics, punctuation, sure - but I always assumed that chunking was un

I never thought about this element of cross language structure before. Text direction, diacritics, punctuation, sure - but I always assumed that chunking was universal. Turns out no: “the typographical notion of the paragraph does not really exist in a Tibetan text the way it does in European languages. As a result, Tibetan texts often need to be processed as a long stream of uninterrupted text with no forced line breaks, sometimes over hundreds or thousands of pages. “

crazygringo 2y ago
Tens of pages, sure. But hundreds? Thousands? Do they not have the concepts of headers? Sections? Chapters? Both in non-fiction and fiction, there are a lot more means of content separation than just paragraphs.
- DougMerritt 2y ago
  "Continued on next scroll"
  - Obscurity4340 2y ago
    Its all about the scrolls, man
- lazide 2y ago
  ‘I don’t have time to make a short letter, so I made a long one instead’ -Mark Twain [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21422-i-didn-t-have-time-to-write-a-short-letter-so https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21422-i-didn-t-have-time-to...] That kind of organization takes time, editing, multiple revisions to get right, etc. And a mindset that it is useful. In many cases (like if you’re a religious caste), having a giant wall of text that requires skill to identify elements from, is a plus. Do you want your ciphertexts formatted into paragraphs too?
  - mmooss 2y ago
    Are you really saying that Tibetan doesn't use spaces and paragraphs because the creators or perhaps all Tibetans don't want to spend time editing or can't organize their writing well enough?
    - lazide 2y ago
      Not saying can’t. Arguably, there isn’t anything anyone can’t do. At least until they go broke. I’m saying that different societies have different priorities/expectations/motivations, and there is clearly a reason they don’t do it, or it wouldn’t be so consistent eh? It’s not like white space isn’t the default on a writing surface. Do you have any alternative theories? I could also imagine scrolls being expensive, so ‘fluff’ like white space is discouraged, and not easily re-used or overwritten based on the inks, so re-editing or the like doesn’t actually work. But I’m just speculating here. Edit: the scripta continua link above had a good reference to Greek/roman examples where they were transcriptions by slaves of spoken monologues. They didn’t have paragraphs or the like because people don’t speak in paragraphs. They also don’t edit their words when they speak, and rarely do ‘chapters’. Footnotes, bibliographic references, etc. also don’t really make sense in the way we might think if it’s ’a record of spoken words’ vs ‘words representing ideas on their own’. So writing used more like transcriptions of famous speeches or lectures, less as standalone and independent works. And I assume every culture has the equivalent of 2 hour long speeches that could have been a one page email. “Before and after the advent of the codex, Latin and Greek script was written on scrolls by slave scribes. The role of the scribes was to simply record everything they heard to create documentation. Because speech is continuous, there was no need to add spaces.”
      - crazygringo 2y ago
        > because people don’t speak in paragraphs. I mean, we kind of do. We use an especially low "final" intonation when we finish explaining an idea, and an especially high "intro" intonation when we start. Kind of the same way we do with individual sentences, but more exaggerated. And we take longer pauses. When you transcribe someone talking for 10 minutes on a podcast, for example, you don't invent paragraphs out of thin air. They're generally pretty clear. > and rarely do ‘chapters’. Again, we do. People rarely talk for 20 hours straight; rather they give hour-long lectures delivered across 20 days. Each one is a chapter. Even an hour-long speech is generally clearly divided into sections. The speaker concludes the section, changes their intonation, "asks" the audience what that leads to, takes a long pause while the audience contemplates, then presents the "answer" which is the start of the new section. The reason you might not think we use this organization when speaking is because it's encoded is intonation and timing -- prosody. And we don't directly represent prosody in writing systems. But that doesn't mean it's not there when spoken. Indeed, a major part of being an effective speaker of the written word is in "restoring" this prosody that is missing on the page. And things like paragraphs and sections are major clues towards that end.
- noisy_boy 2y ago
  Stream processing before it was cool.
- sandworm101 2y ago
  Which is why this isnt a about saving a language, rather preserving it in a paticular state. They dont want it to evolve into the modern world as a living language. They want to lock it into the rules of a paticular time. That means not accomidating recent innovations so that, hopefully, they are never encorporated.
  - jrochkind1 2y ago
    This change doesn't do anything to prevent in this case Tibetan from "accommodating recent changes". It makes it possible to support the language as it was used historically and as I understand it is used presently. Even if it were to change presently, there are still historical documents which should be supported. It sounds like you want to force change (and specifically change in the direction of what more common languages do), as opposed to "accomodate" it. i would say that making software more flexible to handle more unusual things actually "accomodates innovation" in all languages the software supports. The more things you can support, instead of requiring everything to work the same, the more you are actually accommodating innovation.
teractiveodular 2y ago
The same applies to old Chinese, and in fact most ancient languages. Latin and Greek were originally written in scriptio continua, meaning no punctuation or spacing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua
jdub 2y ago
Count yourself lucky (by mere hundreds of years) you have spaces.
tokai 2y ago
Paragraphs in the west as, indentation or separation of text, are not even a thousand years old. In the ancient world a paragraph was denoted with a typographical mark.

crazygringo 2y ago

Tens of pages, sure. But hundreds? Thousands? Do they not have the concepts of headers? Sections? Chapters? Both in non-fiction and fiction, there are a lot more means of content separation than just paragraphs.

DougMerritt 2y ago
"Continued on next scroll"
- Obscurity4340 2y ago
  Its all about the scrolls, man
lazide 2y ago
‘I don’t have time to make a short letter, so I made a long one instead’ -Mark Twain [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21422-i-didn-t-have-time-to-write-a-short-letter-so https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21422-i-didn-t-have-time-to...] That kind of organization takes time, editing, multiple revisions to get right, etc. And a mindset that it is useful. In many cases (like if you’re a religious caste), having a giant wall of text that requires skill to identify elements from, is a plus. Do you want your ciphertexts formatted into paragraphs too?
- mmooss 2y ago
  Are you really saying that Tibetan doesn't use spaces and paragraphs because the creators or perhaps all Tibetans don't want to spend time editing or can't organize their writing well enough?
  - lazide 2y ago
    Not saying can’t. Arguably, there isn’t anything anyone can’t do. At least until they go broke. I’m saying that different societies have different priorities/expectations/motivations, and there is clearly a reason they don’t do it, or it wouldn’t be so consistent eh? It’s not like white space isn’t the default on a writing surface. Do you have any alternative theories? I could also imagine scrolls being expensive, so ‘fluff’ like white space is discouraged, and not easily re-used or overwritten based on the inks, so re-editing or the like doesn’t actually work. But I’m just speculating here. Edit: the scripta continua link above had a good reference to Greek/roman examples where they were transcriptions by slaves of spoken monologues. They didn’t have paragraphs or the like because people don’t speak in paragraphs. They also don’t edit their words when they speak, and rarely do ‘chapters’. Footnotes, bibliographic references, etc. also don’t really make sense in the way we might think if it’s ’a record of spoken words’ vs ‘words representing ideas on their own’. So writing used more like transcriptions of famous speeches or lectures, less as standalone and independent works. And I assume every culture has the equivalent of 2 hour long speeches that could have been a one page email. “Before and after the advent of the codex, Latin and Greek script was written on scrolls by slave scribes. The role of the scribes was to simply record everything they heard to create documentation. Because speech is continuous, there was no need to add spaces.”
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      > because people don’t speak in paragraphs. I mean, we kind of do. We use an especially low "final" intonation when we finish explaining an idea, and an especially high "intro" intonation when we start. Kind of the same way we do with individual sentences, but more exaggerated. And we take longer pauses. When you transcribe someone talking for 10 minutes on a podcast, for example, you don't invent paragraphs out of thin air. They're generally pretty clear. > and rarely do ‘chapters’. Again, we do. People rarely talk for 20 hours straight; rather they give hour-long lectures delivered across 20 days. Each one is a chapter. Even an hour-long speech is generally clearly divided into sections. The speaker concludes the section, changes their intonation, "asks" the audience what that leads to, takes a long pause while the audience contemplates, then presents the "answer" which is the start of the new section. The reason you might not think we use this organization when speaking is because it's encoded is intonation and timing -- prosody. And we don't directly represent prosody in writing systems. But that doesn't mean it's not there when spoken. Indeed, a major part of being an effective speaker of the written word is in "restoring" this prosody that is missing on the page. And things like paragraphs and sections are major clues towards that end.
noisy_boy 2y ago
Stream processing before it was cool.
sandworm101 2y ago
Which is why this isnt a about saving a language, rather preserving it in a paticular state. They dont want it to evolve into the modern world as a living language. They want to lock it into the rules of a paticular time. That means not accomidating recent innovations so that, hopefully, they are never encorporated.
- jrochkind1 2y ago
  This change doesn't do anything to prevent in this case Tibetan from "accommodating recent changes". It makes it possible to support the language as it was used historically and as I understand it is used presently. Even if it were to change presently, there are still historical documents which should be supported. It sounds like you want to force change (and specifically change in the direction of what more common languages do), as opposed to "accomodate" it. i would say that making software more flexible to handle more unusual things actually "accomodates innovation" in all languages the software supports. The more things you can support, instead of requiring everything to work the same, the more you are actually accommodating innovation.

teractiveodular 2y ago

The same applies to old Chinese, and in fact most ancient languages. Latin and Greek were originally written in scriptio continua, meaning no punctuation or spacing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua

jdub 2y ago

Count yourself lucky (by mere hundreds of years) you have spaces.

tokai 2y ago

Paragraphs in the west as, indentation or separation of text, are not even a thousand years old. In the ancient world a paragraph was denoted with a typographical mark.