Scriptio continua

Initially, Latin texts commonly marked word divisions by points, but later on the Romans came to follow the Greek practice of scriptio continua.

The reader had the liberty to insert pauses and dictate tone, which made the act of reading a significantly more subjective activity than it is today.

However, the lack of spacing also led to some ambiguity because a minor discrepancy in word parsing could give the text a different meaning.

[6] Though paleographers disagree about the chronological decline of scriptio continua throughout the world, it is generally accepted that the addition of spaces first appeared in Irish and Anglo-Saxon Bibles and Gospels from the seventh and eighth centuries.

[7]: 120–121 When word separation became the standard system, it was seen as a simplification of Roman culture because it undermined the metric and rhythmic fluency generated through scriptio continua.

In contrast, paleographers today identify the extinction of scriptio continua as a critical factor in augmenting the widespread absorption of knowledge in the pre-Modern Era.

By saving the reader the taxing process of interpreting pauses and breaks, the inclusion of spaces enables the brain to comprehend written text more rapidly.

However, modern vernacular Chinese differentiates itself from ancient scriptio continua through its use of punctuation, although this method of separation was borrowed from the West only in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Before this, the only forms of punctuation found in Chinese writings were marks to denote quotes, proper nouns, and emphasis.

Modern Tibetic languages also employ a form of scriptio continua; while they punctuate syllables, they do not use spacing between units of meaning.

The entire Swedish Rök runestone is written in scriptio continua, which poses problems for scholars attempting to translate it.

Modern Japanese is typically written using three different types of graphemes, the first being kanji and the latter two being kana systems, the cursive hiragana and the angular katakana.

While spaces are not normally used in writing, boundaries between words are often quickly perceived by Japanese speakers since kana are usually visually distinct from kanji.

[12] This example shows the first line of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Javanese script, and a case of the text being divided, as in some modern writing, by spaces and dash signs, which look different.

Because of the absence of space, in computer typography, the line-break have to be inserted manually, otherwise a long sentence will not break into new lines.

This is opposed to the comparatively more recent method of writing in Gurmukhi known as pad ched, which breaks the words by inserting spacing between them.