Interword separation is the act and the effect of mutually separating the written representations of words. Not all languages have, or have had, interword separation, with some of them not even having an easily identifiable concept of "word". An expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of knowledge, technique, or skill whose judgment is accorded authority and status by the public or their peers. ... A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together. ...

According to Paul Saenger in Spaces between Words, the early Semitic languages—which had no vowel signs—had interword separation, but languages with vowels (principally Greek and Latin) lost the separation, not regaining it until much later. The Semitic languages are the northeastern subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic languages, and the only family of this group spoken in Asia. ... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ...

In modern languages, though punctuation marks used for other reasons (such as commas or semicolons) may have the side-effect to break consecutive words, the issue of separating distinct consecutively written terms exists in general. Depending on the language and the epochs interword separation may be achieved by means of special symbols or conventions, or by means of "blank zones", called spaces. The term punctuation has two different linguistic meanings: in general, the act and the effect of punctuating, i. ... A space is a punctuation convention for providing interword separation in some scripts, including the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic. ...

Types of separations

Vertical lines

The ancient Anatolian hieroglyphs frequently (but not always) used vertical lines to separate words. Similarly, Linear B used short vertical lines. However, this technical advance mostly died out.

Slashes and dots

One reference implies that Phoenician originally used slashes and dots to mark word boundaries. It continues to say that Hebrew and Aramaic scribes borrowed the slash and dot advance, and in Aramaic used a space.

Vertical lines/dots

Ethiopic inscriptions used a vertical line, but on paper was written as two dots, resembling a colon (in Unicode, "ethiopic wordspace", at U+1361: ፡). This double-dot symbol also appears in ancient Turkic.

Interpunct

The Romans used the interpunct, a small dot, to separate words for a while before abandoning it (COGITO·ERGO·SVM‬).

Different letter shapes

Because Hebrew script and Arabic script do not have vowels, it is particularly important to recognize word boundaries. While Hebrew and Arabic have always used spaces between words, some letters also have different shapes depending upon their position.

Five Hebrew letters take a different shape when they are at the end of a word. Arabic characters have up to three different shapes, depending upon whether they are at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. Additionally, characters can have yet another shape when they stand alone, as headings in an index.

Vertical space

The Nastaliq version of the Arabic script also uses vertical space to separate words. The beginning of each word is written high up above the baseline, while the end of the word is low, near the baseline; the line of text ends up looking a little bit like the teeth of a saw. While Nastaliq script is sometimes used to write Arabic, it is more often used for Persian, Uyghur, Pashto, and Urdu.

The Anatolian languages are a group of extinct languages, either Indo-European or (in some classifications) closely related to Indo-European, which were spoken in Asia Minor, including Hittite. ... Linear B script sample Linear B is a script that was used for writing Mycenaean, an early form of Greek. ... Phoenicia was an ancient civilization in the north of ancient Canaan, with its heartland along the coastal plains of what are now Lebanon and Syria. ... Hebrew (עִבְרִית ‘Ivrit) is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by more than seven million people in Israel with the West Bank, the United States, and Jewish communities around the world. ... Aramaic is a Semitic language with a 3,000-year history. ... Geez (also transliterated Giiz, , and pronounced IPA ; ISO 639-2 gez) is an ancient language that developed in the Ethiopian Highlands of the Horn of Africa as the language of the peasantry. ... Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken across a vast area from Eastern Europe to Siberia and Western China with an estimated 140 million native speakers and tens of millions of second-language speakers. ... An interpunct is a small dot used for interword separation in ancient Latin script, being perhaps the first consistent visual representation of word boundaries in written language. ... ‹ The template below has been proposed for deletion. ... The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing in the Arabic language. ... The Arabic language (Arabic: ‎ translit: ), or simply Arabic (Arabic: ‎ translit: ), is the largest member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. ... Nastaliq or Nastaleegh (نستعلیق) is a specific style for writing in the Arabic alphabet. ... Nastaliq or Nastaleegh (نستعلیق) is a specific style for writing in the Arabic alphabet. ... Persian (known variously as: فارسی Fârsi or پارسی Pârsi, local name in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, Tajik, a Central Asian dialect, or Dari, another local name in Tajikistan and Afghanistan) is a language spoken in Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Southern Russia, neighboring countries, and elsewhere. ... Uyghur (in Uyghur: ئۇيغۇرچه, new spelling: UyÆ£urqÉ™ or ئۇيغۇر تىلى, UyÆ£ur tili; in Chinese: 维吾尔语 WéiwúěryÇ”) is a Turkic language spoken by the Uyghur people in Xinjiang (also called East Turkestan or Uyghuristan), China. ... Pashto (پښتو; also known as Afghan, Pushto, Pashto, Pashtoe, Pashtu, and Pukhto) is the language spoken by the ethnic Afghan otherwise known as the Pashtun people who inhabit Afghanistan and the Western provinces of Pakistan. ... The phrase Zaban-e Urdu-e Mualla written in Urdu Urdu () is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan family that developed under Persian, Turkish, and Arabic influence in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1200-1800). ...

Rediscovery of spaces in Latin

The Irish appear to have been the first to consistently use blank spaces to delimit word boundaries in the Latin alphabet, sometime between 600 to 800. As Irish is from a different branch of the Indo-European language family than Latin, the Irish would have had much more difficulty reading Latin than the Romans would have had. Thus they would have had greater incentive to make reading Latin easier. The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred languages and dialects (443 according to the SIL estimate), including most of the major languages of Europe, as well as many in Southwest Asia, Central Asia and Southern Asia. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ...

See also

• Space (punctuation)