/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>2674606
Common misconception.

>>1879401
>>1879397
>>1879392
>>1879362
People, spacing in Japanese was considered during the Meiji reforms, but was ruled out because Japanese scholars took into consideration Japanese's highly agglutinative nature. At around classical times, prior to borrowing vocab from Chinese, the definition of a "word", "phrase" or even "sentence" was not clear. It was considered that each meaningful syllable added to the meaning of the entire structure, and in effect, an entire sentence can be considered a single word. Because of this it was considered ungrammatical to put in spaces. Furthermore, spaces are not necessary in Japanese, even without kanji. Many unspaced documents have been written solely with kana from around the 4th century to the Edo era, and was in fact more popular at times because not as many people could read kanji.

Of course, modern Japanese is punctuated throughout with Chinese vocabulary, and too be quite honest they could simply INVENT a spacing rule, like Korea and Vietnam.

To illustratte, Korean faces a similar problem, having a slightly higher number of Chinese borrowings. You would imagine they would have a hard time reading from unspaced hangul alone, but as is the case with kana, Korean documents have occasionally been written in full hangul throughout history with no comprehensible problems. It was not until the 30s that mixed hangul/hanja scrips with abolished and spaces were put in by the reformists.

The bottom line is that there's no reason to use logographic characters from an analytic language in a synthetic one, it's inefficient and simply a waste of time. Spacing is a minor issue they could do with or without.