Spacing within words

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Speaking of spaces between syllables (but, as in this case, not all syllables), as we have been in recent posts, this photograph of a sign in China was sent in by Paul Midler:

But the lettering is very nice!



8 Comments

  1. David Morris said,

    October 8, 2018 @ 4:05 am

    Slightly related: in South Korea I saw a shop with EMOC on one door handle and LEW on the other.

  2. John said,

    October 8, 2018 @ 5:04 am

    My pupils, when they occasionally attempt syllabification, equate letters with characters, bunging in the break wherever they please. And then to add insult to injury, they typically put the hyphen at the start of the following line (because they [subconsciously] treat it like 一 [yī]?)

  3. AntC said,

    October 8, 2018 @ 5:40 am

    With trepidation for the embarrassing political incorrectness …

    Nosmo King https://youtu.be/ygii9HAPzeU

  4. philip said,

    October 8, 2018 @ 6:03 am

    We have a real problem here with designers deciding that no space between separate words looks better but also capitalising the separate words. I blame YouTube … but have a look at this tourist attraction in memory of Seamus Heaney called, on road signs and everywhere else (except in the url address, I note), Seamus Heaney HomePlace.

    http://www.seamusheaneyhome.com/home-place/

  5. BZ said,

    October 8, 2018 @ 11:34 am

    @philip,
    Does "home place", however it's spelled, have a meaning in Ireland? I can't imagine that phrase in any context (googling reveals mostly proper names).

  6. J.W. Brewer said,

    October 8, 2018 @ 12:30 pm

    @philip, so-called CamelCase (more precisely this is what the wiki article calls "upper camel case") goes way way back before youtube. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case

    There's an odd usage of it some places in Taiwan to deal with the recurrently-discussed-at-LL issue of Mandarin words made up of more than one syllable/morpheme/"character." So street signs in Taipei (but not necessarily elsewhere – this seems to be a municipal-level style thing) will give the romanized names of the streets or the places they are heading as e.g. (to use an example I found on pinyin.info) BeiTou rather than Beitou. Or Bei Tou, Bei-Tou, Bei-tou etc. At least as of about two years ago, this CamelCase usage seemed pretty ubiquitous for street-signs proper in Taipei, but was not used at all by e.g. the subway system (which presumably had different decision-makers) in its signage for station names, even when the same toponym was both the name of a street and an adjacent subway stop.

  7. the Viking Diva said,

    October 8, 2018 @ 12:52 pm

    @BZ,
    dunno about Ireland, but I've heard rural Iowans (US) use it to refer to the ancestral family home or farm, perhaps still the residence of senior members in an extended family – e.g., 'The kids are grown and have houses in town now, but on Sunday everyone comes back to the home place for dinner.' This article suggests it is a southern US phrase, but I think of it as a phrase of country people.

    http://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/472

  8. philip said,

    October 8, 2018 @ 6:18 pm

    @BZ yip, the home place is where the parents still live.

    Funny story about the Heaney Centre opening. A visiting Big Cheese got a taxi and asked the taxi driver to take him to 'The Heaney HomePlace'. The taxi driver drove along country roads for a while before pulling up at a private house, not an Arts Centre. When the Big Cheese opined that he thought he had been brought to the WrongPlace, the driver said, 'Well, that;s where he lived when he lived here,'

    JB Brewer: thanks for the info about other languages, but do you find it irritating in English? CamelCase is a new term for me: thanks!

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