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Comment by hizlikovboy27 | Hacker News Reader

the Augustine passage is a fascinating piece of evidence, but i wonder how much we can infer from it about the wider reading habits of the ancient world.

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To get to that, we have to first think about the literacy rate in antiquity, which is estimated at 5 to 10%. And of those, most could probably read well enough to get by, but didn't routinely read longer texts. So someone who was well-enough versed in reading to not have to read the text out loud in order to understand it was probably a rare and noteworthy creature indeed...

And you can't read long texts if there aren't that many to begin with. But it raises a question - why didn't China, which invented printing press earlier, didn't fare better?

> why didn't China, which invented printing press earlier, didn't fare better?

Moveable type was invented in the 11th century [1]. Kublai Khan moved in in the 13th. Then the Mings spent a couple centuries being autocratic menaces, Qianlong went on a pogrom of China's scholars and Europe caught up.

By the 13th century, China–uniquely–had both moveable-type presses and joint-stock companies. A combination of bad luck (the Mongols) and a tendency towards political shitshows squandered that lead.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_As...

Yeah, we tend to forget that progress unfortunately doesn't move steadily in one direction...

Yeah, in Ancient Rome, the typical unit of writing was a scroll, not a book. Books (codices) only came to be widespread by 300 AD, and "widespread" still means "quite rare and expensive, but not totally unheard of".

Because the Chinese writing system is immensely complicated, and alphabets are far easier to typeset.

You have to know over two thousand characters to read classical Chinese, with some appearing very rarely.

I would imagine most reading would be "let me read that sign" and not much else. To most folks, writing was probably logographs - "Ah, I've seen that collection of letters before, that meant 'pub' "

Public signage with words was basically nonexistent in the pre-modern era. Why bother? The overhead of getting literate people was reserved for the stuff that couldn't be communicated in symbols, like keeping records for the taxman or contracts to prevent future land disputes.

British pubs traditionally have a hanging signboard with a pictorial illustration of the name. Several examples at:

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

If most of the audience is actually illiterate, why not draw a beer and a chicken leg instead? I believe that’s what most signage actually was.

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