 However, modern vernacular Chinese differentiates itself from ancient "scriptio continua" through its use of punctuation, although this method of separation was borrowed from the West only about a century ago.Before this, the only forms of punctuation found in Chinese writings were marks to denote quotes, proper nouns, and emphasis.Modern Tibetic languages also employ a form of "scriptio continua"; while they punctuate syllables, they do not use spacing between units of meaning.