Comment by glandium
3 years ago
Since you're quoting France, it's worth noting that there, double punctuations (?:!;) are preceded by a half-space (although in practice it's always a full space). Likewise, guillemets are surrounded by spaces (the space inside the guillemets might be a half-space, I'm not entirely sure). So it would be « Hello there ! »
Easy way to identify francophone writers. They always have a space in front of their colons, exclamation marks, etc.
Ahhhhh, thanks for that! I'm German speaking, and I must admit I questioned the intellectual capacity of some people I conversed with, due to that. In German there is even a slur for it: "Deppenleerzeichen" (fool's whitespace). Now that clears things up.
Just a convention. I used to snigger at the English language convention of capitalising the next sentence in a letter/email after the address - after all, you're still in the same sentence, so why capitalise it. But, it's a conventional thing, so now I do it myself.
That says more about you, frankly.
Eastern Europeans often drop articles because that’s (apparently) what they do in some Slavic languages. That’s a minor second/third-language quirk, not about an intellectual deficiency (lack of capacity).
Of course, some extra whitespace is even more harmless.
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I never heard about the "Deppen Leerzeichen" in the context of punctuation, but always when German texts split up compound words with a space for no reason.
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An unbreakable half-space, to be pedantic (though in this case the pedantry makes sense: you don't want your punctuation mark to end up on the next line)
And for extra fun, while the French word for space (espace) is masculine gender (un espace) for most its meanings, in typography, it's feminine (une espace).