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hernesheir commented on the word -

maqaf, in Hebrew.

December 29, 2011

alexz commented on the word -

Is twitter and mobile communication making us drop the dash between words?
hashtags seem to run words together. twitter makes us save space, and mobile phones are hard to type on.   Myself, I rarely use these dash things.

September 19, 2015

TankHughes commented on the word -

This topic interests me, but I don't have a good answer to your specific question. Maybe mobile typing difficulty is being counteracted by auto-fill results, so you type in sticktoitiveness and it recommends stick-to-it-iveness. What I offer is a historical perspective on writing.

Before doing an MA that involved learning about English compounding 1000-present, I thought there was a natural progression of compound orthography (compound word -> compound-word -> compoundword). But! That's not true. Orthography does not tell if if something is a compound. English writing styles have changed for many reasons.

This is a casual recounting, but true in general:

First there was scriptio continua, no spaces between any words, which helped to save on paper (vellum) which was costly, but hard to read, and on top of that they used minims.

Then when Irish monks were taking dictation, they didn't know what the words meant, so they made spaces between the words, based on the way the head monk spoke them.

When French was quite in fashion, hyphenating became popular in phrases and compounds.

German has had some spelling reforms to include MORE hyphenation, to help tourists who are intimidated by space-less compound strings in public signage.

Some very well-established compounds have always had a space (ice cream) or hyphen (co-op) to help with legibility.

Many phrases have several co-existing variants that vary depending on the style guide.

Hyphens definitely matter in 3-part compounds, where the middle word could be linked to either the 1st or 3rd word, e.g., "AP interviews lion hunting dentist." https://twitter.com/katz/status/643445960169943041

September 19, 2015

alexz commented on the word -

I guess we can thank autocomplete, autocorrect , the red squiggle of disapproval and the green squiggle of grammar

September 19, 2015

alexz commented on the word -

it turns out the maqaf has an entry in unicode and it's ־

The difference between ־ (maqaf) and - (hyphen-minus) is that it shows up in the right hand side of textboxes.

־ so it would affect rendering on a computer screen depending on computer.

September 23, 2016