Are Vietnamese words spaced?
The Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese Writing Systems
This site provides some concise intro to C, J, and V writing systems. Although I don’t see anything relevant to how words are spaced in V. My interest was piqued by the wikipedia entry on Word, where I found the following claim.
Especially confusing are languages such as Vietnamese, where spaces do not necessarily indicate breaks in words and boundaries must be determined by the context of the piece.
What does this mean?
The wikipedia Word page has an external link to the following essay:
What is a word?
By Larry Trask, Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Sussex.
[Essay]
Which contrasted various senses of Word. This points to Oscan, an antient Itlian language that used dots as word deliminators, at least in inscriptions.
The Oscan alphabet is written from right to left, a feature preserved in Etruscan but not in Latin. Also, to mark separation between words, a dot is used, as in the following example from Pompeii:
Apparently the dot is not a patent of the Oscan writing. This EveryThing2 page provides some (credible?) sources about the origin of word spacing, and this page on punctuations is also relevant — as much as it can be trusted.
Finally, I have been wanting to buy this book for a while, but I don’t know if Nunberg talked about spacing or not.