8 ms·
I know that they don’t literally mean a single word, but it got me thinking: is a space ever a valid character in a word? I’m guessing no, because that’s fundam
by Waterluvian 2y ago
I know that they don’t literally mean a single word, but it got me thinking: is a space ever a valid character in a word? I’m guessing no, because that’s fundamentally how languages separate tokens
However, while I’m no language person, I have wallowed in unicode enough times to recognize that the “rules” of language are so wild and varying and riddled with exceptions that basically anything is possible.
- fooqux 2y agoAt least in English (I don't know other languages well enough to speak with any any kind of knowledge) whenever you want a term containing 2+ words meant to be taken together, you use a hyphen. Compound words, I believe they are called. From what I can tell, they should have spelled it brain-rot.
- gruez 2y ago>whenever you want a term containing 2+ words meant to be taken together, you use a hyphen. Compound words, I believe they are called. So the shopping festival after thanksgiving should be called "black-friday"?
- snvzz 2y agoOr just brainrot. It'll win at the end. Hitting that spacebar is effort.
- fooqux 2y agoYes, many words that started out as two words separated by a hyphen merge to become one as language evolves. Notebook is a good example of this; a more recent example would be email.
- xanderlewis 2y agoIn German it happens even more quickly.
- teractiveodular 2y agoI thought you only used hyphens in German in exceptional circumstances like proper names in compounds? Karl-Marx-Allee etc.
- xanderlewis 2y agoWell, what I meant was that concepts made up of several words almost immediately become one word in German (without hyphens).
- karaokeyoga 2y agoA general heuristic is: single word is the noun form (e.g. "I made a backup"), two words is the verb form (e.g. "back up your data"), and hyphenated words is the adjectival form (e.g. "the back-up copy is over there").
- FabHK 2y agoOne minute on Wikipedia would have disabused you of that wrong notion: > If the joining of the words or signs is orthographically represented with a hyphen, the result is a hyphenated compound (e.g., must-have, hunter-gatherer). If they are joined without an intervening space, it is a closed compound (e.g., footpath, blackbird). If they are joined with a space (e.g. school bus, high school, lowest common denominator), then the result – at least in English – may be an open compound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)
- garciansmith 2y agoThe practice of placing spaces between words is connected to writing, so not some fundamental part of language. There are early Latin texts that don't have word dividers at all, for instance, and some languages used different symbols like dots.
- teractiveodular 2y agoYes: an open compound has two words separated by a space, but still has a unique meaning. Ice cream, common sense, never mind, etc. FWIW, there are plenty of languages that don't use any spaces at all in their writing (Japanese, Chinese, Thai), and the use of spacing is quite fluid even in English. Is it a cellphone or a cell phone?
- llm_trw 2y agoLike always scheme has a solution to the problem. Symbols that contain space separated word are enclosed in ||, |this is a symbol|, that while the naked space is still the symbol separator token. Now if we can just remove all other punctuation for s-expressions we'd finally have the start of a language fit for the digital age.
- qiqitori 2y agoAre you allowed to use "se" in Scrabble because it exists as a single word in "per se"?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- vitus 2y agoNo, "se" here is Latin in the same way that "exempli" and "gratia" are. You similarly can't use "kung" or "fu". That said, you may not like this answer, but ultimately whatever's in the official dictionary (now known as Collins Scrabble Words / CSW) is what goes. "mein" as in "chow mein" is not valid (nor is "chowmein"), but "lomein" and "wonton" are.
- proc0 2y agoSpace is arguably the absence of a character. It is only a character for creating encoding standards in computing systems (*or actually since the typewriters).
- joshdavham 2y agoSo technically in linguistics, the spoken language is considered the ground truth while the way the language is written is just a crude representation of the spoken language. What this implies is that a space being used between two tokens doesn't actually make it two words. You can still consider that to be one word. (Also, if you wanna go even more meta, there isn't even a widely agreed upon definition for what a word even is in linguistics!)
- Tainnor 2y ago> (Also, if you wanna go even more meta, there isn't even a widely agreed upon definition for what a word even is in linguistics!) To be even more precise, there are several competing definitions of what "word" should mean that don't always agree. E.g. if you go by the criterion "word" = lexeme (dictionary unit), then something like "kick the bucket" would be a "word".
- gpvos 2y agoIn English, yes. In many other languages, no.
- gniv 2y ago> is a space ever a valid character in a word? No, because then how do you define a word? I suspect grammar has another term(!?) for the concept you're looking for.