| With the kind of mixed script used in Japan and that used to be used in Korea, they're not exactly necessary (still useful, but not necessary). Neither language uses prefixes much, so a sinograph is a pretty reliable indicator of the beginning of a word, followed by the inflection written out in a phonetic script like hiragana or hangeul. In Japanese's case, a switch from hiragana to katakana also indicates a word boundary and highlights that the word's likely a nonsinitic loan or the name of a plant or animal species or other technical term. Say, for example: "Korean people eat kimchi" In Japanese/Korean, the structure would be: Korean-person-topic marker-kimchi-object marker-eat-present tense. In Japanese mixed script, that looks like: 韓国人はキムチを食べます。and would be read as "kankokujinwa kimuchiwo tabemasu". Splitting it with spaces: 韓国人は キムチを 食べます。 The heftier kanji denoting "Korean person" and at the start of "eat" should be clear even to the untrained eye, while people who've studied the language can easily tell that キムチ is "kimuchi" written in katakana. The sentence is pretty easy to parse without spaces, at the cost of using one of the most insane writing systems in the world. Now, what if we wrote the entire thing in hiragana instead? かんこくじんはきむちをたべます。 ... yyeaahh. Spaces. Please. かんこくじんは きむちを たべます。There, much better, though almost no one fluent in Japanese has practice reading stuff like that. In Korean, without spaces we'd have: 한국사람들은김치를먹어요. Again, similar problems. Korea has adopted spaces now that they don't use sinographs, so we'd have: 한국 사람들은 김치를 먹어요. (han'guk sa'ram'deul'eun kim'chi'reul mog'o'yo) If we wrote "Korean person" with the same Sinitic loans in the Japanese sentence, we might get: 한국인들은 김치를 먹어요. (han'gug'in'deul'eun kim'chi'reul mog'o'yo) Spaces clearly do help. |