Huh. That's actually pretty neat. Thank you for reminding me that this sub is still worth following sometimes.

>most scholars agree that the Greeks and Romans got round their lack of punctuation by murmuring aloud as they read through texts of all kinds.

As if people reading aloud wouldn't be bad enough, these were people murmuring aloud. I get it that you wouldn't be surrounded by people like you would be in a crowded elevator, but still, murmuring?

When I learned Spanish, I discovered the problem of word juncture. English has it, Spanish much less so. That's part of what makes reading it easier than hearing it - it's hard to tell with spoken language where one word end and the next one starts.

I could not read it because paywall (or rather register wall), but that doesn't sound completely correct. Even before (gasp!) spaces were invented, Latin had the "interpunct" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpunct

Scriptio continua though was a thing used for a long time but apparently more for style and theatrics than anything else. It looks like reading was seen as an oratory performance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua

or your sibling reading that secret admirer note aloud for the 20th time?

Jewish texts (such as the Talmud and associated commentaries) have very little to no punctuation. I learned to read them with a kind of singsong melody that helps you figure out the phrasing, as is traditional. It’s so cool to think that that’s a thing that happens in other languages too!

I believe Irish monks came up with the idea of spaces between the letters in the manuscripts they were copying.

Ahhhh just like 8th grade Spanish then!

Hahaha yes

Yesitareallyhardtohearindidividualwordswhenitcomestoromancelanguagesingeneralwhichiswhythesoundsallblendintooneanotherunlikegermaniclanguageswhicharegenerallymoredefinedphonetically

Here'sthetextforanyancientGreekandRomanlurkers.

TILthemajorityofancientGreeksandRomansthatwereliteratereadoutloud.Reasonsforthisincludealackofspacebetweenlettersandnoformalizedsystemofpunctuationthathelpedwithpausesinreading.

trup really is just a musical form of punctuation.

Reminds me of the episode of Bored where Rowan discovers that he doesn't have to read out loud.

https://youtu.be/gAQRGdfcptU

thisguygetsit

This is very easily understandable though.

I learned it the other way around in my history of books class. Documents were writing without spacing and punctuation because they were meant to be read aloud.

Ancient Latin didn't have lowercase letters or word order. You have to decipher it from conjugations and context.

I see us that weren't replaced by vs, not authentic enough. :P

Isn't French brutal about that, where you're often required to move sounds from one word to another?

TFW you're chilling at the honey & goat cheese fried bread stand after exfoliating in the Roman Bath steam room, and some jerkoff is reading a fable out loud right next to you.

You try to leave, but he follows you into the public toilet area. After you pour the water jug to flush the toilet, a little bit of it splashes on his parchment paper and he gets really mad, starting a fight where he cuts you with an ornamental dagger.

3 weeks later, you die of an infection from the cut after your doctor prescribed a treatment of ground-up spices and herbs that did literally nothing to help.

Yeah we don't really realise that writing and reading is a technology . We learn spoken language automatically as kids - reading and writing then takes over a decade of intense training!

English language is an advanced technology!

Come on, it’s gotta have heuristic word ordering even if the language doesn’t strictly require it. I guess it’s just so unimaginable that every time I said a sentence I’ll say it differently

When Augustine was writing his book Confessions he commented that Ambrose (Bishop of Milan in the late 4th century, later became a saint) read "his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud."

Thankyou

I could read that easily

>3 weeks later, you die of an infection from the cut after your doctor prescribed a treatment of ground-up spices and herbs that did literally nothing to help.

But would go on to become the Colonel's famous recipe.

You must be spanish.

No. Isn't it because English is a Germanic language?

Makes sense to me if these languages began as a recital, like a chant. They may have began as oral traditions after all.

Languages study in general. People never stop to think about language families.

For example, why it took millennia for people to realize how closely related were Greek, Celt, Latin, Sanskrit, Scythian, Persian and German (all are Indo-European) despite more or less intense exchange between people using them?

Because we didn't have grammar rules or standards, so patterns were insanely hard to distinguish and could vary from location or speaker.

So instead they had a feeling that things were similar, which ended up with a lot of them assuming things an universal kind of base for everything.

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Also German likes to cram words together. Doppelkupplungsgetriebe: a double clutch gear box.

There is a British TV show called Q.I, where they'll often deal with curious facts.
One episode did mention this, involving what was so unusual about a monk reading in silence.
I believe that was somehow noted as being unusual (since they had vows of silence) and it could then be deduced that if that was thought of as unusual, that means speaking when reading was the norm.

A little bit of research tells me it was Saint Ambrose, who was noted for an unusual ability (at the time) of reading without moving his lips