en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_divider
1 correction found
Alphabetic writing without inter-word separation, known as scriptio continua, was used in Ancient Egyptian.
Ancient Egyptian writing was not an alphabetic writing system. Egyptian hieroglyphs mixed consonantal signs with other sign types such as logograms and determinatives, even though they were often written without spaces.
Full reasoning
This sentence misclassifies Ancient Egyptian writing as alphabetic.
Authoritative descriptions of Egyptian hieroglyphs explain that they were not an alphabet in the normal sense. Harvard's Digital Giza notes that hieroglyphs are not "letters" in the same sense as the English alphabet: some signs represent multiple sounds, and some have no sound at all but help classify meaning. Unicode likewise describes Egyptian hieroglyphic writing as using 24 signs for individual consonants alongside other signs for sequences of two or three consonants and logograms that can be read as whole words or classifiers.
So it is accurate that Ancient Egyptian texts often lacked spaces between words, but it is inaccurate to describe Ancient Egyptian writing itself as "alphabetic writing."
2 sources
- Digital Giza | Ancient Egyptian Writing
Hieroglyphs are not "letters" in the same sense as the English alphabet. Individual hieroglyphic signs do not necessarily correspond to the sound of one modern letter... some have no sound at all, but instead visually help to classify the meaning of a word.
- Chapter 11 - Unicode 16.0.0
Egyptian hieroglyphic writing made use of 24 hieroglyphs for individual consonants. Other hieroglyphs are used to represent a sequence of two or three consonants. In addition to these phonetic characters, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing made use of logograms...