Interesting | Spaces Between Written Words

Interesting discovery today, while skipping around links I happened upon a post (in Nicholas Carr's "Rough Type" blog) that was celebrating the pronouncement of "realtime" as an official compound word. We no longer need to separate them as "real time" (Are you listening Bill Maher?).

Carr's post was about twitter culture, but I was far more fascinated with the source that inspired him to write about the spaces between words, "Space Between Words The origins of silent reading" by Paul Saenger. From the book, we learn that spaces between words were a convention originally decided by some anonymous monk, around 1000 years ago. Considering the earliest writing:

"Ancient reading was usually oral, either aloud, in groups, or individually, in a muffled voice."

This makes sense, since (prior to Evelyn Wood) literacy was a rare commodity. And with reading abillity being quite rare (one literate knave per erstwhile dyne), I suppose it makes even more sense that ancient writers, who were even rarer, could afford to be divas and not be bothered with any sense of sympathy for their target audience. And, since books were assumed to be read aloud, it should also be the job of the reader to decide on punctuation, sentence structure, inflection, and if the sentence, "ishouldprobablyseekthehelpoftherapists" would result in the desired psychological aid, or a mistaken brutal attack (go back and read it again if you didn't get it).

"The greater part of this book describes in detail how the new format of word separation, in conjunction with silent reading, spread from the British Isles and took gradual hold in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The book concludes with the triumph of silent reading in the scholasticism and devotional practices of the late Middle Ages."

This makes me wonder about the chicken and egg nature of such feedback loops. Did more people develop literacity and learn to read silently to themselves because writers went out of their way to make it easier? Or did writers make it easier in attempt to compete for the attention of a growing audience of personal readers? I suspect it more likely that the people who had the resources to become literate were simply growing less popular. And with fewer people showing up at their medieval reading parties, eventually they found themselves reading to empty rooms. I wonder how many centuries of reading to nobody passed before the readers, who were looking quite old and grizzled at this point, decided to stop with the formalities, and just read quietly to themselves. One thing is for certain, with the invention of new conventions such as capitalization, punctuation, and of course the spaces between words, it made it a lot easier for the readers to work in realtime (My first official use of this new word... in context!).

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