Scriptio continua

Vergilius Augusteus, Georgica 141ff, written in capitalis quadrata and in scriptio continua.

Scriptio continua (Latin for "continuous script"), also known as scriptura continua or scripta continua, is a style of writing without spaces or other marks between the words or sentences.

In the West, the oldest Greek and Latin inscriptions use word dividers; however, Classical Greek and late Classical Latin both employed scriptio continua as the norm.[1][2] Before the advent of the codex (book), Latin and Greek script was written on scrolls. The reader would typically already have memorized the text through an instructor, had memorized where the breaks were, and the reader often read aloud, usually to an audience in a kind of reading performance, using the text as a cue sheet. Organizing the text to make it more rapidly ingested (through punctuation) was not needed and eventually the current system of rapid silent reading for information replaced the older slower performance declaimed aloud for dramatic effect.[3] Increasing numbers of European texts were written with spaces between words from around AD 1000 in northern Europe to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when all European texts were written with words separated.[4]

Scriptio continua is still in use in Thai, other Southeast Asian abugidas (Burmese, Khmer, Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese script), Lao, and in languages that use Chinese characters (Chinese and Japanese). Modern vernacular Chinese differs from ancient scriptio continua in that it does at least use punctuation, although this was borrowed from the West only about a century ago. Before this, the only forms of punctuation found in Chinese writings were punctuations to denote quotes, proper nouns, and emphasis. Modern Tibetic languages also employ a sort of scriptio continua; although they punctuate syllables, they do not use spacing between units of meaning.

Examples

Latin text

Latin text in scriptio continua with typical capital letters, taken from Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum:

Which in modern punctuation is:

Modern English

A form of scriptio continua has become common in internet e-mail addresses and domain names where, because the "space" character is invalid, the address for a website for "Example Fake Website" is written as examplefakewebsite.com – without spaces between the separate words.

Spring and Fall (1880) by Gerard Manley Hopkins rendered in scriptio continua (20 characters per line) as a theoretical example:

MARGARETAREYOUGRIEVI
NGOVERGOLDENGROVEUNL
EAVINGLEAVESLIKETHET
HINGSOFMANYOUWITHYOU
RFRESHTHOUGHTSCAREFO
RCANYOUAHASTHEHEARTG
ROWSOLDERITWILLCOMET
OSUCHSIGHTSCOLDERBYA
NDBYNORSPAREASIGHTHO
UGHWORLDSOFWANWOODLE
AFMEALLIEANDYETYOUWI
LLWEEPANDKNOWWHYNOWN
OMATTERCHILDTHENAMES
ORROWSSPRINGSARETHES
AMENORMOUTHHADNONORM
INDEXPRESSEDWHATHEAR
THEARDOFGHOSTGUESSED
ITISTHEBLIGHTMANWASB
ORNFORITISMARGARETYO
UMOURNFOR

For comparison, here is the poem rendered in its original normal punctuation:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Chinese language

Here is an example of a normal Chinese sentence, then what it would look like with spaces between words, then a pinyin transcription (in which words are normally divided), and finally an English translation:

Javanese script

An example of the first line of the declaration of human right in Javanese script, and when they are divided (in some modern writings) by spaces and dash sign, which looks different: (if you can't see the script, you can see the sample image here)

Because of the absence of spaces, in modern writing (and on computers), the line-breaks have to be inserted manually, otherwise a long sentence will not break into new lines. Some computer input methods use a zero-width space (ZWS) instead for word breaks, which would then break the long sentences into multiple lines, but the drawback of that method is it will not render the writing "correct".

See also

References

  1. ↑ E. Otha Wingo. (1972). Latin punctuation in the classical age. The Hague: Mouton.
  2. ↑ Brent Harmon Vine (1993). Studies in archaic Latin inscriptions. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck.
  3. ↑ Richard A. Lanham (2006). The Economics of Attention. ISBN 0-226-46882-8. page 113-115
  4. ↑ Saenger, Paul (1997) Space between words: the origins of silent reading, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, pages 120-1.
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