When [Ambrose] read, his eyes scanned the page and his voice was silent and his tongue was still.
— Saint Augustine: Confessions, 397 CE
The fact that a scholar like Augustine would express surprise on finding Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, reading silently tells us something about how readers approached books in the ancient world. For thousands of years-from the invention of writing in the fourth century BCE to around 1000 CE-reading almost invariably meant reading aloud. For most of that time, it also meant reading from unbroken lines of text.
Notice, for instance, that in the writing in the accompanying page from the Codex Sinaiticus-a copy of the Greek Bible made around 350 CE-is in scriptura continua (continuous script), with no spaces between words. For almost all readers, understanding came by sounding out the syllables; early writing was meant to be read aloud. When we talk, we-don’t-speak-like-this, but wespeaklikethis, and the ancients wrote the way they spoke. Back then, stringing together letters without spaces between words was hardly a problem.
Around 800 CE Irish monks, invented the word-break system which we still use today, leading to near-universal silent reading, since spaces between words relieved readers of the need to sound out text. Actually, the monks re-invented word breaks. Previous to 800 BCE, when the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, most writing in the ancient world did have spaces between words-but those words lacked vowels. When Greek scribes added symbols for vowels, they apparently considered word breaks an unnecessary convenience. For well over a thousand years, first Greeks, then Romans, wrote almost exclusively in scriptura continua.
Why would those intelligent, literary people drop what seems to us such an obvious advantage for the reader? According to literary-detective Paul Saenger in Space Between Words (devoting nearly 500 pages to the question), “[Readers] relished the mellifluous metrical and accentual patterns of pronounced [i.e. spoken] text and were not interested in the swift intrusive consultation of books [so] the absence of interword space in Greek and Latin was not perceived to be an impediment to effective reading…”
When scribes began to add spaces between words, they changed the whole neuropsychological process of reading. No longer did a solitary reader have to slowly and painfully extract information from text, mumbling to himself as he did so. With the task of word separation now assigned to the scribe rather than the reader, reading became silent, rapid, effortless and meditative, and what had formerly been a chore became a delight. Inevitably ever-increasing numbers of people wanted to experience it for themselves. And since you’ve gotten this far, I trust you agree.
Barry Evans (barryevans9@yahoo.com) wonders what Ambrose would have made of a Kindle.
This article appears in Tales of Subversion.
I have read this idea in several sources and have always felt that the ancients, when they were not just keeping records, wrote mostly as an aide to memorization (I am thinking here of Homeric texts especially). The idea that reading was always something that the ancients did out loud has been debunked. James Fenton in the Guardian wrote an article a few years back on why the myth refuses to die: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jul/29/featuresreviews.guardianreview27
Thanks for this Geoff.
Paul Saenger does address the two examples mentioned in the Guardian article (Phaedra and Alexander the Great) and convincingly, imho, disposes of them both.
Barry
If the article in the first comment is accurate, it’s some pretty thin evidence that Professor Burnyeat cites to bolster his not-widely-accepted argument. The first forms of punctuation used in Medieval European documents were intended to assist in reading aloud. Spanish still retains the inceptive, inverted question mark and exclamation point which aid those who are reading aloud. The common conventions which facilitate our silent reading are relatively recent inventions.
Not sure if ¿ and ¡ go back to Medieval Europe, Joel.
According to wikipedia, “[in] Spanish and Leonese, typography since the 18th century has required opening and closing question marks.”
(I notice in Mexico they now sometimes skip the inceptive question mark.)
They are not that old, but they were created in the tradition of aiding aloud reading, as all early punctuation was believed to have been intended for. Silent reading, of course, was also aided by punctuation. The question mark was an actual word at one time — a convention of scriptura continua, which must have been maddening to read silently, or even aloud.
The dominant assumption of ancient aloud-reading will not be displaced anytime soon.
I think any pre-industrial intellectual…or even half wit…would have taken one look at e-books, their portable devices, the resources necessary to make and maintain them, as well as the fact that they require constant consumption of further resources (involving, among countless other factors, manual labor [valuable life minutes], attentive subscription, $$$, etc.)….
….and….
….thrown the pieces of crap in the garbage after the first set of batteries died. That’s even assuming they were gifts, because I doubt they’d buy into the gimmick. Anybody wanna guess how soon before we see a small pile of them in every thrift store across the nation?