For a period, Latin scribes actually did try separating words with dots, but in the second century A.D., there was a reversion—a giant and very curious step backward, it would seem—to the old continuous script used by the Greeks. Spaces weren’t seen again in Western writing for another nine hundred years. From our vantage point today, separating words seems like a no-brainer. But the fact that it was tried and rejected says a lot about how people used to read. So, too, does the fact that the ancient Greek word most commonly used to signify “to read” was ánagignósko, which means to “know
...more
