I can’t believe nobody has done this list yet. I mean, there is one about names, one about time and many others on other topics, but not one about languages yet (except one honorable mention that comes close). So, here’s my attempt to list all the misconceptions and prejudices I’ve come across in the course of my long and illustrious career in software localisation and language technology. Enjoy – and send me your own ones!
Is there a language this actually isn’t true for? It seems oddly specific like a lot of the others and I don’t think I know of one that does this. Except maybe some wack ass conlangs of course.
There are languages that don’t have the concept of “punctuation” at all.
Even in english this isn’t true, for example dots can appear inside a sentence for multiple reasons (a decimal number, an abbreviation, a quotation, three dots, etc, etc), which would make you split it into more than one piece.
English. I can go to the store and buy a sandwich for $8.99 all in one sentence, but splitting it on periods gives you two sentences.
“splitting on end-of-sentence punctuation” would not split on 8.9 though!?
Oh of course, I didn’t think about punctuation occurring in the middle of a sentence. Duh, thanks.
@2xsaiko @TehPers there’s other examples too. E.g. Thai has no spaces between words but spaces between phrases/sentences. However the spaces between phrases involve style choices similar to comma in English and many other Latin script writing systems. Also, Thai may have spaces around abbreviations special characters.
I’m quite familiar with Thai so that’s close at hand but I guess it’s the same in a lot of other writing systems based on Brahmic scripts.
Interesting, thanks!