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Inpunctuation, aword divider is a form ofglyph which separates writtenwords. In languages which use theLatin,Cyrillic, andArabic alphabets, as well as other scripts of Europe and West Asia, the word divider is a blankspace, orwhitespace. This convention is spreading, along with other aspects of European punctuation, to Asia and Africa, where words are usually written without word separation.[1][better source needed]
Incharacter encoding,word segmentation depends on which characters are defined as word dividers.
InAncient Egyptian,determinatives may have been used as much to demarcate word boundaries as to disambiguate the semantics of words.[2] Rarely inAssyrian cuneiform, but commonly in the later cuneiformUgaritic alphabet, a vertical stroke 𒑰 was used to separate words. InOld Persian cuneiform, a diagonally sloping wedge 𐏐 was used.[3]
As the alphabet spread throughout the ancient world, words were often run together without division, and this practice remains or remained until recently in much of South and Southeast Asia. However, not infrequently in inscriptions a vertical line, and in manuscripts a single (·), double (:), or triple (⁝)interpunct (dot) was used to divide words. This practice was found inPhoenician,Aramaic,Hebrew,Greek, andLatin, and continues today withEthiopic, though there whitespace is gaining ground.
The earlyalphabetic writing systems, such as thePhoenician alphabet, had only signs forconsonants (although some signs for consonants could also stand for avowel, so-calledmatres lectionis). Without some form of visible word dividers, parsing a text into its separate words would have been a puzzle. With the introduction of letters representing vowels in theGreek alphabet, the need for inter-word separation lessened. The earliest Greek inscriptions used interpuncts, as was common in the writing systems which preceded it, but soon the practice ofscriptio continua, continuous writing in which all words ran together without separation became common.
Alphabetic writing without inter-word separation, known asscriptio continua, was used in Ancient Egyptian. It appeared in Post-classical Latin after several centuries of the use of the interpunct.
Traditionally,scriptio continua was used for theIndic alphabets of South and Southeast Asia andhangul of Korea, but spacing is now used with hangul and increasingly with the Indic alphabets.
TodayChinese andJapanese are the most widely used scripts consistently written without punctuation to separate words, though other scripts such asThai andLao also follow this writing convention. In Classical Chinese, a word and acharacter were almost the same thing, so that word dividers would have been superfluous. AlthoughModern Mandarin has numerous polysyllabic words, and each syllable is written with a distinct character, the conceptual link between character and word or at leastmorpheme remains strong, and no need is felt for word separation apart from what characters already provide. This link is also found in theVietnamese language; however, in theVietnamese alphabet, virtually all syllables are separated by spaces, whether or not they form word boundaries.
Space is the most common word divider, especially inLatin script.
Ancient inscribed and cuneiform scripts such asAnatolian hieroglyphs frequently used short vertical lines to separate words, as didLinear B. In manuscripts, vertical lines were more commonly used for larger breaks, equivalent to the Latin comma and period. This was the case forBiblical Hebrew (thepaseq) and continues with many Indic scripts today (thedanda).
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| The Latin interpunct |
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As noted above, the single and double interpunct were used in manuscripts (on paper) throughout the ancient world. For example, Ethiopic inscriptions used a vertical line, whereas manuscripts used double dots (፡) resembling a colon. The latter practice continues today, though the space is making inroads. Classical Latin used the interpunct in both paper manuscripts and stone inscriptions.[5]Ancient Greek orthography used between two and five dots as word separators, as well as thehypodiastole.
In the modernHebrew andArabic alphabets, some letters have distinct forms at the ends and/or beginnings of words. This demarcation is used in addition to spacing.
TheNastaʿlīq form ofIslamic calligraphy uses vertical arrangement to separate words. The beginning of each word is written higher than the end of the preceding word, so that a line of text takes on asawtooth appearance. Nastaliq spread from Persia and today is used forPersian,Uyghur,Pashto, andUrdu.
Infinger spelling and inMorse code, words are separated by a pause.
For use with computers, these marks havecodepoints inUnicode:
InLinear B script:
this line is spaced.