Nicholas Bodley wrote:

> A neighbor, with above-average intelligence (but not a good speller) and
> surely part of "mainstream" US culture, native-born, hand-letters
> announcements of monthly meetings of our local Tenants' Association. She
> doesn't use word spaces, but interpuncts! According to the Wikipeda
> article, their use in our culture stopped around 600-800 CE (AD). Hers is
> not the only instance of such usage I've seen (I'll soon be 72), although
> it's rare.
>
> I find it fascinating that an outdated tradition should persevere for so
> long.
>

Several ancient writing systems commonly used dot-shaped word
separators. Samaritan writing continues to use them today. Because
they use dots to separate words and not spaces, they are free to add
spaces anywhere they please, since they do not interrupt words.
Samaritan scribal tradition has therefore developed several ways of
using this freedom.

Most simply, Samaritan scribes frequently adjust spacing so that
identical letters will line up under each other, in long columns down
the page. This is particularly frequent, and easy, in repetitive
sections of the Bible. See
http://www.fathom.com/course/72810016/s1_4_z14.htm for an example. The
text is Leviticus 19:7-19:19, which isn't even all that repetitive.

You can also occasionally see designs drawn with the whitespace, as in
this picture I snapped with my phone camera:
http://pics.livejournal.com/seqram/pic/0000240d/g3 I thought it was
just an abstract design, but I have since learned that the design is
supposed to represent the holy mountain, Mt. Gerizim, which is the
subject of the text.

The really cool thing they do is called a "tashkil". It's like a
colophon embedded in the text. The above link at fathom.com refers to
it as a "cryptogram," since that's sort of what it is. They rule a
narrow column down the page, and then, when writing, the scribe may
choose to write a letter in that column or to skip that column,
inserting whitespace. He makes these decisions in such a way that when
you read the letters in that column *downward*, they spell out a
message, saying things like "I, Abraham son of Benjamim(*), wrote this
scroll in the three thousand and fiftieth year..." [(*) Yes, with an M
at the end. That's how the Samaritans spell the name)]. Whatever other
information or anything. It is absolutely impossible to fake one of
these: if it wasn't there when the text was written, there's no way to
add one in later. Obviously it's a major boon to researchers.

There are one or two one-dot word separators in Unicode already, and if
you ask me there really ought to be just one that's shared in common by
all scripts that use them. But the ones there at the moment are not in
the BMP, which isn't right. It should be in General Punctuation.

You can see them occasionally in inscriptions in English as well.

~mark