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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Off topic but I just noticed there are no spaces between words in the old Greek papyrus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_75?wprov=sfti1

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/-YQMdlv22BA8jnWvqnca...

I’m curious how much more difficult it would be to learn to read in a largely illiterate world without many documents around. While having the additional burden of identifying words within one long string of characters.

Google tells me it’s called Scriptio Continua and the first documents to use spaces and punctuation were later Bibles.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua?wprov=sf...

I know it’s common in some Asian languages but their character systems account for it better.

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ITCANBESLOWBUTYOUCANSTILLREADIT.

One thing that makes Greek somewhat easier to read without spaces than English would be is the inflection system. Almost every word follows a set system of rules for how the end (and sometimes the beginning) of a word changes. After a while it becomes less difficult to read because you start seeing those patterns as word boundaries. Spaces and lowercase are easier of course.

So there aren't too many "expertsexchange" type issues in Greek?

One of the latest History of English Podcast episodes explains the origins of punctuation and spacing between words. https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2021/07/29/episode-150-a...

Ithinkyouwouldgetusedtoitprettyquickly. Plus, the suffixes on most words of the major languages of the time would have helped delineate words. But I do agree that it could have acted as a small impediment in learning to read.

I wonder if this is part of why there is a special sigma for use at the end of words.

σ is normal sigma and ς is for the endings of words.

I wouldn't think so, I am under the impression lowercase case and thus the two different characters for sigma came after spacing out words.

I think the word-final sigma has been found in manuscripts dating to the 1st century BCE, but I think its use was only in cursive and not universal. So, I think you're basically right; certainly majuscule scripta continua documents like the Codex Sinaiticus or Vaticanus wouldn't have used it.

Oh that's a really neat theory! So many regularly declined nouns and related word classes end in the sigma. It certainly makes sense considering the frequency of -s ending words. The rough breathing mark seems like it could have played a similar role.

(At least, you have the singular nominatives of the 1st declension masculines, all the 2nd declension noms and a fraction of the 3rd declension noms. And then the singular genitives and the plural accusatives and datives. And so on. Using a 2nd person singular verb, you could probably make a complete and rather complicated sentence in which every word ended in sigma.)

That’s easy compared to boustrophedon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon

The potential for confusion arising from a lack of punctuation does appear in the tradition of classical languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibis_redibis_nunquam_per_bella...

And in modern English, the use or absence of the Oxford Comma can critically affect meaning.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/us/oxford-comma-maine.htm...

Both ancient Greece generally and Judaism and early Christianity specifically had strong practices of oral tradition. People memorized long works word for word and often primarily passed them on in this way. Hilariously (to the modern mind), Socrates criticized the practice of writing in general, as he felt discussing, memorizing, and repeating things conferred better mastery of the material (which is hard to disagree with, but...) : https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...

This is one of my favorite examples of people being worried about the secondary effects of adopting technology. We've apparently been worried about that since the invention of writing.

Anyway. A lot of ancient systems of writing seem very ambiguous by modern standards. It is my suspicion that such systems are easier to use in a cultural context in which a lot of people already know by heart what the text is supposed to say. It is less of a complete source in itself and more of a reminder. Socrates, at least, seems to think this is what it is for.

Spaces? The scripts used for the oldest versions of biblical writings didn't have vowels either. It's no wonder there have been bloody generation wars fought over the meaning of brief passages of vague religious tracts. It seems all we need to do is airdrop some vowels and punctuation over some regions and we'll finally have world peace.

I take it that's a reference to the classic Onion report: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/clinton-deploys-v...

Yeah, no punctuation at all and not even lower case letters!

Modern texts have all these things inserted by editors, it does indeed sound much harder to have to learn without these extra aids.

Modern Japanese is interesting here. It also doesn't make use of spaces, capitalization, or much of punctuation for that matter.

Harder certainly, but fluency in the language obviously helps, and inflectional endings and - to a lesser extent - common prefixes will certainly help to delineate word boundaries. And the sort of reading that we are used to today - taking in a page of text via a quick scan - was afaik unknown then, where the mode was to read aloud, at a correspondingly slower pace (although I find this unconvincing for very literate individuals)

It appears to have been Irish monks in the 7th and 8th century who introduced spaces between words in religious texts

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=683

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