Editing Space (punctuation) (section)

===Between words===
{{Main article|Word divider}}
{{Expert-subject|Linguistics|reason=At some point, this subsection contained a lot of incorrect claims about Semitic languages, and weasel-wording. It was clearly written by someone who doesn’t know any of the relevant languages. Some claims remain largely unsupported and Euro-centric. This needs attention from a historical linguist. If such an expert can’t be found, it is better to rewrite this with a focus on developments within individual writing systems – which is ''not'' how it’s structured at the moment.|date=August 2023}}

Modern English uses a space to separate words, but not all languages follow this practice. According to Paul Saenger in ''Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading,'' [[Biblical Hebrew|Ancient Hebrew]] and [[Arabic]] did use spaces partly to compensate in clarity for the [[Abjad|lack of written vowels]] when no {{Lang|la|[[mater lectionis]]}} was used for a vowel, though in the Middle Ages they sometimes omitted spaces when vowel points were marked.<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=w3vZaFoaa3EC&pg=PA10 Saenger 2000, 10]: “the Semitic languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Syriac), when written without vowels, were virtually always written with word separation in antiquity and continued to be so transcribed into modern times”</ref> The earliest Greek script also used interpuncts to divide words rather than spacing, although this practice was soon displaced by the {{Lang|la|[[scriptio continua]]}}. In [[Latin]], spaces and interpuncts came often to be dropped in favor of {{Lang|la|scriptio continua}}, and were not used to separate words again until roughly AD 600–800.

Word spacing was later used by Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes, beginning after the creation of the [[Carolingian minuscule]] by [[Alcuin of York]] and the scribes’ adoption of it. Spacing would become standard in [[Renaissance]] Italy and France, and then [[Byzantium]] by the end of the 16th century; then entering into the Slavic languages in [[Cyrillic]] in the 17th century, and only in modern times entering modern [[Sanskrit]].<ref>Saenger, Paul. ''Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading''. Stanford University Press, 1997, 9–14.</ref>{{dubious|reason=Word spacing was used in Byzantine manuscripts well before the 16th century.|date=March 2024}}

[[CJK characters|CJK]] languages do not use spaces when dealing with text containing mostly [[Chinese characters]] and [[kana]]. In [[Japanese language|Japanese]], spaces may occasionally be used to separate people’s [[family name]]s from [[given name]]s, to denote omitted [[Japanese particles|particles]] (especially the topic particle ''wa''), and for certain literary or artistic effects. Modern [[Korean language|Korean]], however, has spaces as an essential part of its writing system (because of Western influence), given the phonetic nature of the [[hangul]] script that requires word dividers to avoid ambiguity, as opposed to Chinese characters which are mostly very distinguishable from each other. In Korean, spaces are used to separate chunks of nouns, nouns and [[Korean postpositions|particles]], adjectives, and verbs; for certain compounds or phrases, spaces may be used or not, as in the phrase for “[[Republic of Korea]],” usually spelled without spaces as {{lang|ko|대한민국}} rather than with a space as {{lang|ko|대한 민국}}.

[[Runic]] texts use either an [[interpunct]]-like or a [[colon (punctuation)|colon]]-like punctuation mark to separate words. There are two [[Unicode]] characters dedicated for this: {{unichar|16EB|Runic single punctuation}} and {{unichar|16EC|Runic multiple punctuation}}.