Scriptio continua (Latin for "continuous script"), also known as scriptura continua or scripta continua, is a style of writing without spaces or other marks between the words or sentences. The form also lacks punctuation, diacritics, or distinguished letter case. In the West, the oldest Greek and Latin inscriptions used word dividers to separate words in sentences; however, Classical Greek and late Classical Latin both employed scriptio continua as the norm. [1] [2]
Although scriptio continua is evidenced in most Classic Greek and Classic Latin manuscripts, different writing styles are depicted in documents that date back even further. Classical Latin often used the interpunct, especially in monuments and inscriptions.
The earliest texts in Classical Greek that used the Greek alphabet, as opposed to Linear B, were formatted in a constant string of capital letters from right to left. Later, that evolved to "boustrophedon", which included lines written in alternating directions.
The Latin language and the related Italic languages first came to be written using alphabetic scripts adapted from the Etruscan alphabet (itself ultimately derived from the Greek alphabet). Initially, Latin texts commonly marked word divisions by points, but later on the Romans came to follow the Greek practice of scriptio continua. [3]
Before (and after) the advent of the codex (book), Latin and Greek script was written on scrolls by slave scribes. The role of the scribes was to simply record everything they heard to create documentation. Because speech is continuous, there was no need to add spaces.[ citation needed ] Typically, the reader of the text was a trained performer, who would have already memorised the content and breaks of the script.[ citation needed ] During the reading performances, the scroll acted as a cue sheet and therefore did not require in-depth reading.[ citation needed ]
The lack of word parsing forced the reader to distinguish elements of the script without a visual aid, but it also presented the reader with more freedom to interpret the text. 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. For example, a phrase written in scriptio continua as collectamexiliopubem may be interpreted as collectam ex Ilio pubem, meaning "a people gathered from Troy", or collectam exilio pubem, "a people gathered for exile". Thus, readers had to be much more cognisant of the context to which the text referred. [4]
Over time, the current system of rapid silent reading for information replaced the older, slower, and more dramatic performance-based reading, [5] and word dividers and punctuation became more beneficial to text. [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] : 21 Subsequently, an increasing number of European texts adopted conventional spacing, and within the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, all European texts were written with word separation. [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. Furthermore, the brain has a greater capacity to profoundly synthesize text and commit a greater portion of information to memory. [7] : 16–17
Scriptio continua is still in use in Thai script, other Southeast Asian abugidas: (Burmese, Khmer, Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese script), Lao, and in languages that use Chinese characters (Chinese and Japanese). 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 about a century ago.[ clarify ] 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.
Latin text in scriptio continua with typical capital letters, taken from Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum:
Which in modern punctuation is:
With ancient Latin punctuation is: NEQVE·PORRO·QVISQVAM·EST·QVI·DOLOREM·IPSVM·QVIA·DOLOR·SIT·AMET·CONSECTETVR·ADIPISCI·VELIT
Greek text in scriptio continua with typical capital letters, taken from Hesiod's Theogony :
Which in modern punctuation is:
Hebrew text is well known for lacking punctuation for many centuries. Modern versions of the language gradually amended those features.
The entire Swedish Rök runestone is written in scriptio continua, which poses problems for scholars attempting to translate it. One example is a phrase repeated several times, sakumukmini. Interpretations proposed include sagum Ygg minni ("Let us say the memory to Yggr"), sagum mógminni ("Let us say the folk-memory") and sagum ungmenni ("Let us say to the group of young men").
A form of scriptio continua has become common in internet e-mail addresses and domain names where, because the "space" character is invalid, the address for a website for "Example Fake Website" is written as examplefakewebsite.com – without spaces between the separate words. However, the "underscore" or "dash" characters are often used as stand-ins for the "space" character when its use would be invalid and their use would not be.
As another example, so-called camel case—in which the first letter of each word is capitalized—has become part of the culture of many computer programming languages. In this context, names of variables and subroutines as well as other identifiers are rendered easier to read, as in MaxDataRate. Camel case can also eliminate ambiguity: CharTable might name a table of characters, whereas Chartable could ask or answer the question, "Can (something) be charted?"
Chinese does not encounter the problem of incorporating spaces into text because, unlike most orthographic systems, Chinese characters represent morphemes and not phonemes. [3] Chinese is therefore readable without spaces.
Western punctuation was first used in China in the 20th century as a result of interaction with Western culture. [10]
| Script | Text |
|---|---|
| (English translation) | Beijing is in Northern China; Guangzhou is in Southern China. |
| Normal Chinese sentence | 北京在中国北方；广州在中国南方。 |
| without spaces or punctuation | 北京在中国北方广州在中国南方 |
| with spaces between words | 北京 在 中国 北方； 广州 在 中国 南方。 |
| pinyin transcription | Běijīng zài Zhōngguó běifāng; Guǎngzhōu zài Zhōngguó nánfāng. |
However, some of the word jokes still illustrate a potential issue of continuous script in Chinese. A joke, allegedly recorded a contract between a landlord and the poor scholar, utilized:
The landlord intepreted it as
The poor scholar intepreted it as
Japanese implements extensive use of Chinese characters, called kanji in Japanese. However, due to the radical differences between the Chinese and Japanese languages, writing Japanese exclusively in kanji would make it extremely difficult to read. [11] This can be seen in texts that predate the modern kana system, in which Japanese was written entirely in kanji and man'yōgana, the latter of which are characters written solely to indicate a word's pronunciation as opposed to its meaning. For that reason, different syllabary systems called kana were developed to differentiate phonetic graphemes from ideographic ones.
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. Japanese speakers also know that certain words, morphemes, and parts of speech are typically written using one of the three systems. Kanji is typically used for words of Japanese and Chinese origin as well as content words (i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs). Hiragana is typically used for native Japanese words, as well as commonly known words, phrases, and particles, as well as inflections of content words like verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Katakana is typically used for loanwords from languages other than Chinese, onomatopoeia, and emphasized words.
Like Chinese, Japanese lacked any sort of punctuation until interaction with Western civilizations became more common. Punctuation was adopted during the Meiji Period.
| Script | Text |
|---|---|
| (English translation) | Bethany Hills and Akira Takamori are living in Tokyo. |
| hiragana, katakana and kanji without spaces between words (standard Japanese writing) | ベサニー・ヒルズと高森昭は東京に住んでいます。 |
| hiragana, katakana and kanji with spaces between words | ベサニー・ヒルズ と 高森 昭 は 東京 に 住んでいます。 |
| only hiragana and katakana (sometimes employed in media for children such as Pokémon Games) | ベサニー・ヒルズ と たかもり あきら は とうきょう に すんでいます。 |
| romaji | Besanī Hiruzu to Takamori Akira wa Tōkyō ni sundeimasu. |
| kanji and man'yōgana (anachronistic extrapolation of 8th century writing) | 邊三仁伊日流頭吐高森昭歯東京仁須無弟位麻須 |
Modern Thai script, which was said to have been created by King Ram Khamhaeng in 1283, does not contain any spaces between words. Spaces indicate only the clear endings of clauses or sentences. [12]
Below is a sample sentence of Thai written first without spaces between words (with Thai romanization in parentheses), second in Thai with spaces between words (also with Thai romanization in parentheses), and then finally translated into English.
This example shows the first line of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Javanese script, [14] 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. Some computer input methods have put zero-width space (ZWS) instead for word break, which would then break the long sentences into multiple lanes, but the drawback of that method is it will not render the writing correctly.
Before typewriter, computer and smartphones changed the way of writing, Arabic was written continuously.[ citation needed ] That is easy because 22 letters have a final form, which is comparable to initial, or capital, form for the Latin alphabet since the Renaissance. Six letters have only one form, and whenever they occur in a word, there is some space in it that was originally as wide as the space between words. There was also no hyphenation either. In all early manuscripts, words were finished on the next line or, in many Quranic manuscripts, even on the next page.
Before the 1970's, Gurbani and other Sikh scriptures were written in the traditional method of writing the Gurmukhi script known as larivār where there were no spacing between words in the texts (interpuncts in the form of a dot were used by some to differentiate between words, such as by Guru Arjan). 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. [15]
Furigana is a Japanese reading aid consisting of smaller kana printed either above or next to kanji or other characters to indicate their pronunciation. It is one type of ruby text. Furigana is also known as yomigana (読み仮名) and rubi in Japanese. In modern Japanese, it is usually used to gloss rare kanji, to clarify rare, nonstandard or ambiguous kanji readings, or in children's or learners' materials. Before the post-World War II script reforms, it was more widespread.
Japanese is the principal language of the Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 128 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese diaspora worldwide.
Katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script.
Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels, and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes space between words and the other, historically or currently used, signs.
Kanji are the logographic Chinese characters adapted from the Chinese script used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana. The characters have Japanese pronunciations; most have two, with one based on the Chinese sound. A few characters were invented in Japan by constructing character components derived from other Chinese characters. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan made its own efforts to simplify the characters, now known as shinjitai, by a process similar to China's simplification efforts, with the intention to increase literacy among the common folk. Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has published character lists periodically to help direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characters that exist. There are nearly 3,000 kanji used in Japanese names and in common communication.
Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise the only writing system continuously used since its invention. Over time, the function, style, and means of writing characters have evolved greatly. Informed by a long tradition of lexicography, modern states using Chinese characters have standardised their forms and pronunciations: broadly, simplified characters are used to write Chinese in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia, while traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.
In punctuation, a word divider is a form of glyph which separates written words. In languages which use the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic alphabets, as well as other scripts of Europe and West Asia, the word divider is a blank space, or whitespace. This convention is spreading, along with other aspects of European punctuation, to Asia and Africa, where words are usually written without word separation.
An interpunct⟨·⟩, also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot, centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in Classical Latin. It appears in a variety of uses in some modern languages and is present in Unicode as U+00B7·MIDDLE DOT.
In writing, a space is a blank area that separates words, sentences, syllables and other written or printed glyphs (characters). Conventions for spacing vary among languages, and in some languages the spacing rules are complex. Inter-word spaces ease the reader's task of identifying words, and avoid outright ambiguities such as "now here" vs. "nowhere". They also provide convenient guides for where a human or program may start new lines.
Iteration marks are characters or punctuation marks that represent a duplicated character or word.
Kanbun is a form of Classical Chinese used in Japan from the Nara period to the mid-20th century. Much of Japanese literature was written in this style and it was the general writing style for official and intellectual works throughout the period. As a result, Sino-Japanese vocabulary makes up a large portion of the Japanese lexicon and much classical Chinese literature is accessible to Japanese readers in some resemblance of the original. The corresponding system in Korean is gugyeol (口訣/구결).
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.
In modern Japanese, ateji principally refers to kanji used to phonetically represent native or borrowed words with less regard to the underlying meaning of the characters. This is similar to man'yōgana in Old Japanese. Conversely, ateji also refers to kanji used semantically without regard to the readings.
Word spacing in typography is space between words, as contrasted with letter-spacing and sentence spacing. Typographers may modify the spacing of letters or words in a body of type to aid readability and copy fit, or for aesthetic effect. In web browsers and standardized digital typography, word spacing is controlled by the CSS1 word-spacing property.
Many East Asian scripts can be written horizontally or vertically. Chinese, Vietnamese Hán-Nôm, Korean, and Japanese scripts can be oriented along either axis, as they consist mainly of disconnected logographic or syllabic units, each occupying a square block of space, thus allowing for flexibility for which direction texts can be written, be it horizontally from left-to-right, horizontally from right-to-left, vertically from top-to-bottom, and even vertically from bottom-to-top.
Text segmentation is the process of dividing written text into meaningful units, such as words, sentences, or topics. The term applies both to mental processes used by humans when reading text, and to artificial processes implemented in computers, which are the subject of natural language processing. The problem is non-trivial, because while some written languages have explicit word boundary markers, such as the word spaces of written English and the distinctive initial, medial and final letter shapes of Arabic, such signals are sometimes ambiguous and not present in all written languages.
Writing systems that use Chinese characters also include various punctuation marks, derived from both Chinese and Western sources. Historically, judou annotations were often used to indicate the boundaries of sentences and clauses in text. The use of punctuation in Written Chinese only became mandatory during the 20th century, due to Western influence. Unlike modern punctuation, judou marks were added by scholars for pedagogical purposes and were not viewed as integral to the text. Texts were therefore generally transmitted without judou. In most cases, this practice did not interfere with the interpretation of a text, although it occasionally resulted in ambiguity.
The full stop, period, or full point. is a punctuation mark used for several purposes, most often to mark the end of a declarative sentence.
The tie is a symbol in the shape of an arc similar to a large breve, used in Greek, phonetic alphabets, and Z notation. It can be used between two characters with spacing as punctuation, non-spacing as a diacritic, or (underneath) as a proofreading mark. It can be above or below, and reversed. Its forms are called tie, double breve, enotikon or papyrological hyphen, ligature tie, and undertie.
The Makasar script, also known as Ukiri' Jangang-jangang or Old Makasar script, is a historical Indonesian writing system that was used in South Sulawesi to write the Makassarese language between the 17th and 19th centuries until it was supplanted by the Lontara Bugis script.
...until the early 1970s all copies of the Guru Granth Sahib were presented in larivaar format, in which all the words were connected without breaks, after which point the SGPC released a single-volume edition in which the words were separated from one another in 'pad chhed' format (Mann 2001: 126). Whereas previously readers would have to recognize the words and make the appropriate breaks while reading, pad chhed allowed "reading for those who were not trained to read the continuous text." (Mann 2001: 126). The AKJ promotes a return to the larivaar format of the Guru Granth Sahib.