Interword separation

Interword separation

Interword separation is the act and the effect of mutually separating the written representations of 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.cite book
last = Saenger
first = Paul
authorlink =
coauthors =
title = Spaces between Words
publisher = Stanford University Press
date = 2000
id = ISBN 0-8047-4016-X
]

In modern languages, though punctuation marks used for other reasons (such as commas or semicolons) may have the side-effect of separating 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.

Types of separations

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 AD and 800 AD. 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 people with, for example, Spanish or Italian (which descended from Latin and are still quite close to it) as their first language. Thus they would have had greater incentive to make reading Latin easier.Fact|date=July 2007

ee also

*Space (punctuation)
*Double spacing

References


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Нужно сделать НИР?

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Interpunct — · Interpunct Punctuation apostrophe ( ’ …   Wikipedia

  • Japanese punctuation — (約物, yakumono ) includes various written marks (besides characters and numbers), which differ from those found in European languages, as well as some not used in formal Japanese writing but frequently found in more casual writing, such as… …   Wikipedia

  • Commander Keen — 5 title screen Developer(s) id Software (DOS) David A. Palmer Productions (GBC …   Wikipedia

  • Delimiter — This article is about delimiters in computing. For delimiters in written human languages, see interword separation. A stylistic depiction of a fragment from a CSV formatted text file. The commas (shown in red) are used as field delimiters. A… …   Wikipedia

  • Word spacing — This article is about the typographic concept; for the practice of writing with spaces between words, see Interword separation Word spacing in typography is the process of increasing or decreasing the space between words. Typographers may modify… …   Wikipedia

  • Latin — Infobox Language name=Latin nativename= la. Lingua Latina pronunciation=/laˈtiːna/ states=Vatican City speakers= Native: none Second Language Fluent: estimated at 5,000Fact|date=April 2007 Second Language Literate: estimated 25,000Fact|date=April …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”