Modern English uses a space to separate words, but not all languages follow this practice. Spaces were not used to separate words in Latin until roughly 600–800 AD. Ancient Hebrew and Arabic did use spaces partly to compensate in clarity for the lack of vowels.Saenger 2000, p. 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" The earliest Greek script also used interpuncts to divide words rather than spacing, although this practice was soon displaced by the .
Modern English uses a space to separate words, but not all languages follow this practice. Spaces were not used to separate words in Latin until roughly 600–800 AD. Ancient Hebrew and Arabic did use spaces partly to compensate in clarity for the lack of vowels.Saenger 2000, p. 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" The earliest Greek script also used interpuncts to divide words rather than spacing, although this practice was soon displaced by the .