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By now I'm pretty sure that English-speakers are gradually forgetting what punctuation is. Quotes and commas are already basically dead—instead, we receive titlecase and italics, and convoluted stream-of-words sentences.



Yeah, runs of nouns and gerunds are notoriously hard to parse. Even a short phrase like "Finding Nemo Audience" cannot be parsed unambiguously. That's what you get when most words can function as nouns verbs and adjectives alike.

"The old man the boat." - a grammatically correct sentence in English. It's like Perl of human languages :)


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Doesn’t really apply to the post title, though. Quotes would help. In Germany we have a thing called “Durchkopplung”. Basically, there are no spaces allowed inside nouns, so compounds are either concatenated or “durchgekoppelt” (which nobody does, unfortunately): The Magic-The-Gathering-Color-Wheel. However, in this case, the most elegant solution would simply be a more clear construction: “The color wheel of ‘Magic: The Gathering’” or, less fortunate, “Magic-The-Gathering’s color wheel”.


What I find interesting is that in spoken language the ambiguity is reduced.


Just be thankful in English there are spaces. Chinese doesn't have even that!


Would it be useful in Chinese? I thought each character is basically a word. Or is that only sometimes true?


Spaces would be useful when reading Chinese. Words are composed of (usually) 1-3 characters. Each character has a particular meaning. Word have their own meaning, independant of the meaning of the characters used.

Often the meaning of the characters in a word kinda implies the meaning of the word, but that's not reliable at all. Sometimes the characters in a word are used just for their sound.


As once it was explained to me, most ideograms can be used as an independent word, but most words are 2 or 3 ideograms long. If I remember correctly an example was faucet=water+dragon


Faucet is dragon 龍 + head 頭. This mostly comes from the shape looking like a dragon statue, and water is stongly associated to dragons.


Thank you for the correction, probably my memory got confused over time.


For short titles and short comments English-speakers should be able to parse quite well.




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