On Writing: An Abecedarian

I've wondered about the connection between the lack of space marks and reading aloud before. It's not obviously causal: reading began as a specialized occupation, and an act of reading was often more valuable if done aloud, so "reading as imitation of thought" wasn't as obvious a practice as "reading as imitation of speech".

But the trick of reading fast is tied to recognizing entire words, which spacemarks not only facilitate but create in the first place. Note that I say "space marks" above and "spacemarks" here, a decision not meaningful in classical writing.

One oddball consequence of my primary education was training in recitative, and it's a whole different beast, reading aloud. The texts were of course written normally, but I don't imagine a lack of whitespace would be such a burden, the attention is on the sound of the words and the meter of the sentence, it 'chunks' differently and with most of the focus on the cursor.

I originally put 'cursor' in quote marks in the preceding paragraph, before remembering, nope, medieval recitative was done with a literal object called the aestel in English. In medieval Latin this was called the "cursor manicula" or the running manicule (this is a manicule: ), since many were in the shape of a hand. The 'cursor' part carried over to the mobile line on slide rules, and thus became the computer cursor we know and love.