Confirmation that spaces are really spaces

[pfeaster]

The result may be exactly the same, but the underlying system and the way we may think about spaces is different.

Nicely put.  My own feeling is that it's easier to account for phenomena such as Smith-Ponzi word-break combinations if we imagine spaces being inserted into fundamentally continuous sequences of glyphs. We might still not know why [dy] and [y.q] are both so common -- but these would then become two observations of the same type rather than observations of two different types (requiring two different kinds of explanation).