How does Arabic & Hebrew manage to be understood when written without punctuation?

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Until recently, I wasn’t aware that Arabic & Hebrew both rarely (if ever) used punctuation. How do sentences manage to not run into each other? Apparently its usage is a more modern occurence.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Context clues basically. Once you hear the sentence, it makes sense where any punctuation should be. Let’s use an example from english to show how a fluent speaker can figure out what stuff is supposed to be without even getting all of it.

I was driving down the road the other day when I saw a billboard advertising for a local internet provider (you can tell by the logo). In huge letters it says INTERNET, and then two smaller words I couldn’t see well from a distance, and then in huge letters again SPEED OF LIGHT. Now if your brain quickly filled in the two missing words as “at the” to make the phrase INTERNET at the SPEED OF LIGHT then you would be correct. Congratulations, your brain filled in the words from context correctly, because those are the only two words that made sense to go there. Similarly, context clues in non-romance languages can tell you a lot about what each bit is supposed to be. Another example is Kanji, which can be entirely contextual ( it changes meaning based on the other Kanji near it).

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