I recently read an article pointing out that putting spaces between written words was not “invented” until sometime in the Middle Ages. (Maybe it was a SD thread that pointed me to that article.) Before then people could not easily decode text without reading it out loud, and it was just assumed that anything written was to be read aloud.
Now I’m wondering about the same thing for Chinese. When I see Chinese signs they seem to be continuous character strings, without breaks between multi-character words. Am I wrong about this? Is there a spacing convention? If so, how does the spacing affect comprehension?
If you’d like to throw in some facts about other non-Western scripts I’d love to hear that, too.
How is “reading aloud” not also “decoding.” If you can sufficiently decode it to read it aloud, you can decode it (read it) and simply skip the “aloud” part. You could even move your lips if you really wanted to.
A significant portion of our brains are evolved for dealing with interpretation of spoken language, and reading aloud is an easy way to get those portions involved in the decoding process. Written language, however, is not nearly old enough to have seen significant evolutionary adaptation.
There aren’t any spacing conventions in Chinese. Each character in Chinese has specific meaning, and is a “word” in its own right; however, as you indicate, two characters are often put together to form a “word”. There are no visual clues to determine what the word is, you just figure it out by context.
When two characters are put together to form one character, one of them is usually squished narrower, and it’s pretty obvious that it’s supposed to be one character. I can read some Chinese at a very elementary level, and I’ve never had to puzzle over whether something was one character or two, except in some stylized calligraphy that I couldn’t make any sense out of anyway.
Keep in mind, though, that Chinese was originally written vertically
I think you misunderstood Clark Cello. In Mandarin Chinese, it’s actually more usual for a word to consist of two or more characters. (I don’t mean two graphemes combined into a single character, I mean two or more whole and entire characters, each taking up the space of an entire character in the relevant font.) An ancestor of the language was mostly monosyllabic (I am told) but the contemporary language is not–most words consist of two or more syllables and each character stands for a single syllable.
And they don’t use spacing to distinguish these words from each other.
There’s a difference between a single character having two components – often with the components squashed up a bit so that they can fit into one character – and two characters forming what we would call a word in English. For example, the two characters 北京 (Beijing) can be regarded as one word, even though in a larger context they don’t have a space before and after them to denote that. That’s different from a character like 期 being composed of 其 and 月squashed into one character.
St. Ambrose’s being able to do that impressed the hell out of St. Augustine:
Silent reading is, historically, the exception, not the rule. People before St. Ambrose could do it (Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, as alleged by Plutarch) but not very many.
When I took Latin, it was said once that it was a great man who could read without moving his lips. Trying to read concatenated English is somewhat hard because of all the historical aberrations in our spelling. Most languages use a far more phonetic spelling system. The only issue in Latin is whether a vowel is short or long.
The lack of spaces in classical Latin has always made me wonder about the supposed enclictic “-que”, like in Senatus Populusque Romanus or whatever, which gets abbreviated SPQR. To me, it looks like the abbreviators thought “que” was a separate word, not an enclictic, and without spaces, is there really a difference?
Reading classical Chinese is a real pain in the ass because of this (especially for a non native speaker, but even native speakers without a grounding in classical Chinese has to work at it). Modern vernacular not nearly so much. People cope. However, IIRC, even classical Chinese has punctuation marks. Certainly, modern Chinese does.
There are no spaces between Thai words, none whatsoever. There are spaces only between sentences. There are rules for how words and syllables begin and end in Thai script, so it’s actually much easier than it sounds.
I was thinking about this, too (but about “bus” instead of “que”). What is or is not a “word” is really hard to pin down. What we define as a word is biased nowadays by where we put the spaces. The Romans might have thought of their many suffixes as helper words rather than as word endings.
I can attest that as a student of Chinese, figuring out where one word ends and another begins can be one royal pain in the butt. A character can be a “word” in its own right, or part of a two or even three character “word.” Sometimes two characters next to one another do combine to form a “word” in one context; in another context, the exact same characters next to one another in the same order mean two separate “words,” or the first character is the tail end of one “word” and the second character is the beginning part of the following “word.” Did I mention it’s a royal pain in the butt?
I can definitely see how this can be a PITA to a non-native speaker. As a native speaker though, this has never been an issue to me. I guess you just know how to parse things intuitively when you learn the language as a child.
Correct, even native speakers have a hard time reading classical Chinese. However, if I understand correctly, the punctuations were not present in the original manuscripts, and were added later on by the editors, just like how word spacing and punctuations were introduced to classical Latin text later on during the Medieval period. I understand that there were “old-school” Chinese punctuations that were different from the modern punctuations currently used for writing Chinese. However, I think even those old-school punctuations were not present in the originals.
My WAG about why -que in Latin is considered a suffix but not a separate word is that, unlike normal words in Latin, -que can never be reordered and must always immediately follow the word that it modifies.
Japanese is the same as Chinese, although reading can be helped some because they have three scripts. A verb root is often in kanji, while the conjugated part is in hiragana. Nouns are often in kanji or katakana, if foreign. Just noticing where the script changes affects sentence structure enough to help.
I’ve heard one of the difficulties in reconstructing ancient books is that they were written on strips of bamboo held together by thread. Over time the thread rotted away, leaving just a jumbled-together pile of bamboo strips. Putting them back in the right order again can’t have been helped by the fact there are no spaces or punctuation; and, AFAIK, in Classical Chinese each character truly is a word in its own right.