“the typographical notion of the paragraph does not really exist in a Tibetan text the way it does in European languages. As a result, Tibetan texts often need to be processed as a long stream of uninterrupted text with no forced line breaks, sometimes over hundreds or thousands of pages. “
But hundreds? Thousands?
Do they not have the concepts of headers? Sections? Chapters?
Both in non-fiction and fiction, there are a lot more means of content separation than just paragraphs.
That kind of organization takes time, editing, multiple revisions to get right, etc.
And a mindset that it is useful. In many cases (like if you’re a religious caste), having a giant wall of text that requires skill to identify elements from, is a plus.
Do you want your ciphertexts formatted into paragraphs too?
I’m saying that different societies have different priorities/expectations/motivations, and there is clearly a reason they don’t do it, or it wouldn’t be so consistent eh?
It’s not like white space isn’t the default on a writing surface.
Do you have any alternative theories?
I could also imagine scrolls being expensive, so ‘fluff’ like white space is discouraged, and not easily re-used or overwritten based on the inks, so re-editing or the like doesn’t actually work.
But I’m just speculating here.
Edit: the scripta continua link above had a good reference to Greek/roman examples where they were transcriptions by slaves of spoken monologues. They didn’t have paragraphs or the like because people don’t speak in paragraphs.
They also don’t edit their words when they speak, and rarely do ‘chapters’.
Footnotes, bibliographic references, etc. also don’t really make sense in the way we might think if it’s ’a record of spoken words’ vs ‘words representing ideas on their own’.
So writing used more like transcriptions of famous speeches or lectures, less as standalone and independent works.
And I assume every culture has the equivalent of 2 hour long speeches that could have been a one page email.
“Before and after the advent of the codex, Latin and Greek script was written on scrolls by slave scribes. The role of the scribes was to simply record everything they heard to create documentation. Because speech is continuous, there was no need to add spaces.”
I mean, we kind of do. We use an especially low "final" intonation when we finish explaining an idea, and an especially high "intro" intonation when we start. Kind of the same way we do with individual sentences, but more exaggerated. And we take longer pauses. When you transcribe someone talking for 10 minutes on a podcast, for example, you don't invent paragraphs out of thin air. They're generally pretty clear.
> and rarely do ‘chapters’.
Again, we do. People rarely talk for 20 hours straight; rather they give hour-long lectures delivered across 20 days. Each one is a chapter.
Even an hour-long speech is generally clearly divided into sections. The speaker concludes the section, changes their intonation, "asks" the audience what that leads to, takes a long pause while the audience contemplates, then presents the "answer" which is the start of the new section.
The reason you might not think we use this organization when speaking is because it's encoded is intonation and timing -- prosody. And we don't directly represent prosody in writing systems. But that doesn't mean it's not there when spoken. Indeed, a major part of being an effective speaker of the written word is in "restoring" this prosody that is missing on the page. And things like paragraphs and sections are major clues towards that end.
I have no evidence and also very little contextual knowledge of Tibetan language and culture. Anything I said would likely turn out to be worthless and, worse, false.
What is that based on?
It makes it possible to support the language as it was used historically and as I understand it is used presently. Even if it were to change presently, there are still historical documents which should be supported.
It sounds like you want to force change (and specifically change in the direction of what more common languages do), as opposed to "accomodate" it.
i would say that making software more flexible to handle more unusual things actually "accomodates innovation" in all languages the software supports. The more things you can support, instead of requiring everything to work the same, the more you are actually accommodating innovation.