Re: Collisions in Space

Hello Daniel,

On 2017/04/14 10:47, Daniel Yacob wrote:
> Greetings All,
>
> A colleague stumbled into Kane's dictionary under Google Books and sent me
> a link to it.  I've seen it before but never looked too closely at it; what
> stood out to me today were the transitions from Amharic to English. Review
> page 51 for example:
>
> https://books.google.com/books?id=H6tnix8o0mwC&lpg=PP1&dq=inauthor%3A%22Thomas%20Leiper%20Kane%22&pg=PA51#v=onepage&q&f=false
>
> When more than one Amharic word appears at the start of a line, hulet neteb
> (Ethiopic Wordspace) will be used between words, but not at the end of the
> final word when the language changes to English.  What reactions do people
> have to this?
>
> It struck me as visually odd not to have the hulet neteb after the last
> word. I can see some logic to this in a document where English is the
> primary language where a space should proceed a word within a sentence.
>
> Two rules appear to be clashing here:  (1) Ethiopic Wordspace required
> after an Amharic word, and (2) Western Space required before the start of a
> word.  Rule (2) appears to have won out since the primary language was
> English.  I would expect (1) to override (2) in an Amharic document at the
> language transition point.
>
> If I were formatting the dictionary I would have applied both rules.  End
> the final Amharic word with hulet neteb followed by the space symbol to be
> visually optimal in an English document (not weird from either language
> context).  It sets up an interesting scenario where two kinds of space
> symbols can appear together in a sensible way.  Thoughts?

This is interesting. Of course, I cannot really say much because I don't 
know Ethiopic/Amharic, but I'd note the following:

- You start with "When more than one Amharic word". Does this mean that
   the hulet neteb is not used for a single word? That would make the
   hulet neteb an interesting "mix" of word-end and word-separation
   character. If it were a pure word-end character, it would have to
   be applied to all words.
- Dictionaries are usually very thick, and use many devices to save
   space. For example, I have a dictionary here in front of me (German-
   Russian-German Langenscheidts Pocket dictionary) which uses a
   vertical bar (|) in the middle of a headword to separate stem and
   ending, and then a tilde (~) in place of the stem for derived words
   further down. Although it may look like a small issue, not using
   a hulet neteb may overall save quite a few pages.
- Japanese doesn't use space between words. In mixed Japanese-Latin
   typography, Latin wins, so there are spaces at any places where
   the scripts change. This is at least how typographers learn it,
   what the Japanese typography standard prescribes, and what software
   such as MS Word and TeX do automatically. The problem is that
   many people don't know about this, and leave out the spaces, and
   that it requires manual work when copying between software that does
   it automatically and software (e.g. MS Powerpoint) that doesn't
   do it automatically.


> መልካም፡ፋሲካ፡ Happy Easter !

Happy Easter to everybody!

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Friday, 14 April 2017 05:25:17 UTC