Scriptio continua ("Continuous script" in Latin; also
scriptura continua) is a style of writing without
spaceIn writing, a space is a blank area devoid of content, serving to separate words, letters, numbers, and punctuation. Conventions for interword and intersentence spaces vary among languages, and in some cases the spacing rules are quite complex....
s or other marks between words or sentences. In the West, the oldest Greek and Latin inscriptions use word dividers, but these are rare in the later periods when scriptio continua becomes the norm (in Classical Greek and late Classical Latin). By around 1000 AD, alphabetical texts in Europe are written with spaces between words.
Scriptio continua ("Continuous script" in Latin; also
scriptura continua) is a style of writing without
spaceIn writing, a space is a blank area devoid of content, serving to separate words, letters, numbers, and punctuation. Conventions for interword and intersentence spaces vary among languages, and in some cases the spacing rules are quite complex....
s or other marks between words or sentences. In the West, the oldest Greek and Latin inscriptions use word dividers, but these are rare in the later periods when scriptio continua becomes the norm (in Classical Greek and late Classical Latin). By around 1000 AD, alphabetical texts in Europe are written with spaces between words. Scriptio continua is still in use in
ThaiThai is the national and official language of Thailand and the mother tongue of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Kradai language family. The Kradai languages are thought to have originated in what is now southern China, and are linked to...
, other Southeast Asian
abugidaAn abugida , also called an alphasyllabary, is a segmental writing system which is based on consonants, and in which vowel notation is obligatory but secondary. This contrasts with an alphabet proper, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is...
s, and in languages that use
Chinese characterA Chinese character, also known as a Han character , is a logogram used in writing Chinese , Japanese , less frequently Korean , and formerly Vietnamese , and other languages...
s (
ChineseChinese or the Sinitic language is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
and
Japaneseis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family. There are a number of proposed relationships with other languages, but none have gained general acceptance...
) though with sentence breaks. Modern 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.
Before the advent of the
codexA codex is a book in the format used for modern books, with separate pages normally bound together and given a cover...
(book), Latin and Greek script was written on scrolls. Reading continuous script on a scroll was more akin to reading a musical score than reading text. The reader would typically already have memorized the text through an instructor, had memorized where the breaks were, and the reader almost always 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.
Examples
One example would be a joke directly related to the subject, whom's text is:
Cansomeonehelpme?Ithinkthespaceonmykeyboardbroke.
Latin text
Latin text in
scriptio continua with typical capital letters
(From CiceroMarcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. Cicero is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.Cicero is generally perceived to be one of the most versatile minds of ancient Rome...
's De finibus bonorum et malorum):
- NEQVEPORROQVISQVAMESTQVIDOLOREMIPSVMQVIADOLORSITAMETCONSECTETVRADIPISCIVELIT
Which in modern punctuation is:
- Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci uelit…
- ‘Nobody likes pain for its own sake, or looks for it and wants to have it, just because it is pain…’
Modern English
Spring and Fall (1880) by
Gerard Manley HopkinsGerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. , was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose 20th-century fame established him posthumously among the leading Victorian poets...
rendered in
scriptio continua (20 characters per line):
MARGARETAREYOUGRIEVI
NGOVERGOLDENGROVEUNL
EAVINGLEAVESLIKETHET
HINGSOFMANYOUWITHYOU
RFRESHTHOUGHTSCAREFO
RCANYOUAHASTHEHEARTG
ROWSOLDERITWILLCOMET
OSUCHSIGHTSCOLDERBYA
NDBYNORSPAREASIGHTHO
UGHWORLDSOFWANWOODLE
AFMEALLIEANDYETYOUWI
LLWEEPANDKNOWWHYNOWN
OMATTERCHILDTHENAMES
ORROWSSPRINGSARETHES
AMENORMOUTHHADNONORM
INDEXPRESSEDWHATHEAR
THEARDOFGHOSTSGUESSE
DITISTHEBLIGHTMANWAS
BORNFORITISMARGARETY
OUMOURNFOR
Spring and Fall (1880) by Gerard Manley Hopkins rendered in 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, ghosts 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
pinyinPinyin , or more formally Hanyu Pinyin , is currently the most commonly used romanization system for Standard Mandarin. Hanyu means the Chinese language, and pinyin means "phonetics", or more literally, "spelling sound" or "spelled sound"...
transcription (in which words are normally divided), and finally an English translation:
- 北京在中国北方；广州在中国南方。
- 北京 在 中国 北方； 广州 在 中国 南方。
- Beijing
Beijing is a metropolis in northern China and the capital of the People's Republic of China...
is in Northern China; GuangzhouGuangzhou , in English formerly known as Canton and also known as Kwangchow, is a sub-provincial city and the capital of Guangdong Province in the southern part of the People's Republic of China.It is a port on the Pearl River,...
is in Southern China.