- Interword separation
Interword separation is the act and the effect of mutually separating the written representations of
word s.The early
Semitic language s—which had no vowel signs—had interword separation, but languages with vowels (principally Greek andLatin ) 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 2007ee also
*
Space (punctuation)
*Double spacing References
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