Whydidnobodyusespaces? Reading Aloud Did Not Need Them

Classical Greek and Latin manuscripts and inscriptions run the letters together continuously with no word division, no punctuation, no distinction between capital and small letters, and frequently no paragraph breaks either. A page is an unbroken field of capitals. Word separation existed earlier in some scripts and was abandoned, so this is a deliberate convention rather than an early stage before somebody thought of spaces. The reader received a string of letters and was expected to supply the divisions, the pauses and the sense.

Several features of ancient reading made it far less difficult than it appears:

• •Reading was normally done aloud, or at least by sounding the words
• •Sounding the letters recovers the words as speech does
• •Texts were frequently already known, so the reader was reminding themselves
• •A trained reader prepared a text in advance before performing it
• •Literate people were a small trained minority with time to spend
• •Word order and grammar constrain the possibilities heavily

Word spacing entered Latin manuscripts through Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes from around the seventh and eighth centuries, and the explanation usually offered is persuasive. Those scribes were copying a language that was not their own and that they did not speak, so they could not rely on sounding out a continuous string to recover the words, and they introduced spaces to make the text tractable. The practice spread back to the continent over the following centuries, along with punctuation and capital letters, and became standard by roughly the eleventh century.

Spacing arrived as part of a larger set of aids that were introduced over the same centuries and that modern readers take entirely for granted. Punctuation marks indicating pauses of different lengths developed from a system of dots at different heights. Capital letters became distinct from small ones, which allows sentence openings and proper names to be flagged. Paragraph marks divided the text into units of argument. Chapter and verse divisions were added to long works, in the case of the Bible several centuries later still, purely so that passages could be referred to. Every one of those is machinery for finding a place in a text rather than for reading it through.

The change is argued to have had consequences well beyond convenience. Silent reading becomes far easier with spaced text, since the eye can take in words as units rather than the mouth reconstructing them, and the historical record of comments about people reading silently as something remarkable belongs to the earlier period. Faster silent reading in turn allows a reader to work through more material, to scan and to consult rather than only to read through, which changes what a library is for. Reference tools including indexes, cross references and alphabetical order all depend on a text that can be searched by eye, and they follow the adoption of spacing rather than preceding it.

Greek and Latin were written as unbroken strings of capitals with no spaces or punctuation, which worked because reading was done aloud and a trained reader prepared a text before performing it. Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes copying a language they did not speak introduced spacing from around the seventh century. Spacing makes silent reading practical, and indexes and scanning follow from it.