> Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 19:44:30 -0500
> From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
> Subject: Re: OT: punctuation
>
>
> > Which leads to my next question: In French,
>
> and also Italian;
No, we do not. I hate when MS Word for some unfathomable reason pretends to
believe I'm writing in French (whereas I'm typing in either Lombard or some
conlangish project of mine;-) and inserts a space between the last word of
the sentence and the question mark...
>I'm not sure about German.
It doesn't.
Luca
> I'm pretty sure Spanish
> puts no space before the punctuation marks; of course, Spanish also has
> the weird leading inverted versions for ? and !.
>
> > Where does the practice of separating punctuation from the sentence come
from?
>
> I believe punctuation marks predate the use of spaces between words, and
> it's just a question of where the writers of a particular language decided
> to put spaces.
>
> -Mark
>