VMs: Spacing (continued)...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Vladimir,

At 12:06 14/03/03 +0000, Vladimir Sazonov wrote:
>  there are many natural languages with a very strange spacing -
> (1) arabic language when spaces occures because word graphic
> for example "w","r","d" have always a small space after them

--> I'm comfortable with this - in fact, if the VMS turns out to be a 
humanistic rendering of Siyaqat made by Italians ex-pats living in 
Constantinople in 1465, I wouldn't be ~entirely~ surprised. :-)

I'll be in the BL next week, so hope to have a look at Lajos Fekete's book 
on Siyaqat then. :-)

> (2) subsentence-oriented spasing as in chinese or japanese

--> I don't want chop suey on my pizza, so I shall swiftly sidestep any 
Chinese-VMS theories. :-)

> (3) long-word-construction rules, where you can make words with unlimited
> length as in turkish and german

--> Given the VMS' lack of particularly long words, can we probably rule 
this option out?

> I think that the additional spacing-rule (if it exists) should produce some
> grammar change and, if we suppose that it is an unknown natural language, we
> can find such new "improved" grammar.

I'm pleased that the idea of letter-based (rather than word-based) spacing 
doesn't clearly post-date the VMS: however, if "space" proves to have no 
meaning (and the text is therefore really just a stream of non-spaces), 
surely we should be very careful when proposing a "grammar"?

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

PS: hmmm.... how do paragraph-initial letters compare with "word"-initial 
letters, distribution-wise? :-9

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