A History of Punctuation

aeon.co

28 pointsdrdee4 comments

Not to forget the middle dot that was often used to separate words in Latin inscriptions.

Linguists like Geoffrey Nunberg and Ted Briscoe have written about the linguistics of punctuation and its role in automatic syntactic processing of text ("Parsing (with) Punctuation").

For Mandarin, detecting the word boundaries in the absence of white space between word-indicating characters or character sequences has been a dedicated sub-task of NLP pre-processing, often applying machine learning in the process: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Chinese-Word-Boundarie...

> For Mandarin, detecting the word boundaries in the absence of white space between word-indicating characters or character sequences has been a dedicated sub-task of NLP pre-processing

This is also really hard(at least for me) for second language learners.

I learned about the history of the space (between words) recently. It is such an integral thing nowadays, but it was not obvious before it existed.

It’s still absent in east-asian script.

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