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Contents › Section 1: Phonetics, phonology and orthography › answer 5 of 32

Is there a long list of languages whose writing systems don't use spaces?

Answered 14 December 2013

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You should clarify the question a bit to make sure you mean 'writing systems', not languages. Spoken language doesn't use spaces (or pauses) in the same way or same place as written language.

But more generally, space in writing is a recent invention to aid in ease of reading. The writing systems of Ancient Greek and Latin did not use spaces. Neither did those of Mesopotamian languages or Ancient Egyptian.

© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).