Confirmation that spaces are really spaces

[Koen G]

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.

I lean the other way, since the word-end glyphs also look like they have been designed for word end. Look at the practice of using a special last minim in roman numerals, for example (xviij). This is similar to [iin]. Similar things can be said about [y] and for example the "-us" abbreviation. I mean, the glyphs kind of look like they belong where we find them most often. 

Although gallows with prefixes may be an exception. [qoty] just looks bad.