Use of "scriptio continua" became less common after the fall of the Roman Empire, and spaces began to appear between words. The first known documents that used spacing were Irish and Anglo-Saxon Bibles and Gospels. However, "scriptio continua" is still used for the writing systems for several modern languages, including Southeast Asian abugidas like Thai, Lao, Khmer, Burmese, Javanese, Balinese, and Tibetan. Languages that use the Chinese character system like Chinese and Japanese sometimes use "scriptio continua", even though modern Chinese and Japanese stopped using it when they adopted punctuation during the 19th and 20th centuries.