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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Some languages don’t even have spaces separating the words. You’d be surprised at the amount of things that aren’t technically necessary in a writing system.
That’s not to say the same thing would work in English, because every language and writing system is different. In a language like Chinese, each character represents a unit of meaning, and “words” are usually only one or two characters long. No real need for spaces.
As for punctuation, there’s no real punctuation when you talk, is there? The “punctuation” is implied by how your tone of voice changes and where you pause, but people don’t always pause between sentences when speaking, either. So really, our brains can actually figure out where “punctuation” goes without it being written down. You’re just not used to it.
Some languages may have a structure that makes punctuation even less necessary. I’m not familiar enough with Arabic and Hebrew, but for example, many languages have the verb at the end of the sentence. So when you read a verb, you can assume that the sentence is over, even if there’s no period.
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