Blackwell Reference Online

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Three different ways of treating word boundaries are found in the writing systems of the world: no marking, indirect marking and overt marking. Systems of no marking are exemplified by Chinese which separates morphemes but not words. In alphabetic writing the S criptura continua of ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions ignores word boundaries, putting letters next to each other with equal spaces within and between words. Indirect marking of word boundaries occurs in writing systems that encode grammatical or semantic information which coincides with word boundaries. For example, Egyptian D eterminatives can be thought of as serving the secondary function of marking word boundaries, although not all words include a determinative. Many writing systems indicate word boundaries with special markers. For instance, Old Persian had a slanted stroke in the south-eastern direction, and Ugaritic used a perpendicular stroke as a word separator. Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Arabic were always written with word boundaries marked by spaces between words, although these divisions were not always consistent. The Ethiopic script used two dots, one above the other. In Latin and other Old Italic inscriptions, words were also usually separated by dots ( Figure 2 ), a practice which was given up when the scriptura continua came into vogue. It was only in medieval times that German and Anglo-Saxon ... log in or subscribe to read full text