There are no spaces between words in Chinese or Japanese.
Pressing space confirms the current selection in the Japanese IME, which is expected behavior. Where some Linux implementations get it wrong is they also insert a space after the word, meaning the user has to select the desired word in the IME with the space bar and then remove the erroneous inserted space.
Edit: Correction based on feedback below. Previously stated that Hangul does not have spaces.
Wrong, there are spaces between words in Korean. It’s in Japanese and Chinese that there isn’t. And in Vietnamese there are spaces between everyone syllables, even in words.
Not sure your comment on Vietnamese is accurate though. I work in a company with ~35% native Vietnamese speakers and I’ve seen plenty of multi-syllable words.
Are you talking about traditional Vietnamese (when it still used Chinese characters) or modern Vietnamese (post-French-colonialism) which uses the Latin alphabet with accents?
It is accurate, there are spaces between each syllable in modern written Vietnamese, except in foreign words. The syllables can have as many as 7 characters, and you need an IME to type the tone marks. The written language looks like this: https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi%E1%BB%87t_Nam
That was not my point. I mentioned Vietnamese because the spacing it uses is interesting.
Also like dfcowell said, Vietnamese used to be written with han & chu nôm characters (respectively Chinese characters and Chinese-like characters created by Vietnamese), a lot of which are encoded in Unicode. Hence the existence of the CJKV acronym.
It is actually CJKV to deal with historical Vietnamese.
From Unicode spec:
> Although the term “CJK”—Chinese, Japanese, and Korean is used throughout this text to describe the languages that currently use Han ideographic characters, it should be noted that earlier Vietnamese writing systems were based on Han ideographs. Consequently, the term “CJKV” would be more accurate in a historical sense. Han ideographs are still used for historical, religious, and pedagogical purposes in Vietnam.
Pressing space confirms the current selection in the Japanese IME, which is expected behavior. Where some Linux implementations get it wrong is they also insert a space after the word, meaning the user has to select the desired word in the IME with the space bar and then remove the erroneous inserted space.
Edit: Correction based on feedback below. Previously stated that Hangul does not have spaces.