Continuous Script and Oral Culture in Europe

Today people commonly read in silence and in private, but that was not the case in Europe during the periods of ancient Greece (800-146 B.C.E.), ancient Rome (753 B.C.E.-476 C.E.), and the centuries that followed. In ancient Greek times, reading was an oral (spoken) practice-one reflected in writing itself. Greek texts were written in a continuous script (without spaces between words) and with minimal punctuation; this both required and rewarded sounding them aloud. Continuous script could not have developed without the Greek introduction of letters for vowels, which allowed readers to identify syllables and hold them in memory as the eye moved across the text.

Though it seems awkward to us now, continuous script was not a natural construction, but a choice, as demonstrated by the fact that the Romans discarded their own punctuation in the first century in favor of the Greek model. It established literacy (ability to read and write) as the domain of a cultured elite, who either studied from a young age to master the skills appropriate for reading each individual text or employed a professional reader, or lector, for the task. It also facilitated a culture of shared inquiry, in which challenging texts were read aloud in groups as an incentive for debate. In ancient Greece, literature was primarily a social activity, with audiences gathering for performances of epic poetry and drama. Epic poems bear the hallmarks of this orality: they rely on repetition, formulaic images, meter, and rhyme as mnemonic (memory) aids to the performer. The term used to describe performances of such works, rhapsody, means "to stitch together"-suggesting the extent to which oral composition relies on weaving familiar lines.

The great thinkers of ancient Greece, in fact, mistrusted writing as a technology that would destroy the oral arts of debate and storytelling on which they based their sense of the world, of philosophy, and of time and space. In Plato's dramatic play Phaedrus, the philosopher Socrates looks down on the written word for separating ideas from their source, citing Egyptian king Thamus as the first to voice this concern when he received the gift of writing from the god Thoth. Transcription (writing speech down), Socrates fears, is an aid that will both interfere with memory and trap philosophical thought in ambiguity, leaving interpretation in the hands of the reader. Texts, after all, can circulate without their author, thus preventing one from explaining or defending them. Despite these fears, the very writing Plato used to record his works proved instrumental in the development of ancient Greek oratory (art of speech making). As scholar Walter Ong points out in Orality and Literacy, his study of the ways writing technologies restructure consciousness, the written word enabled Greek scholars to transcribe and codify effective rhetorical (speaking) strategies. It also vastly increased human vocabulary, since we no longer had to rely on memory to hold all of language for immediate use. Writing, in fact, allowed rhetoric to flourish.

For the kind of silent reading we now experience to take hold, reading would have to change its context and text its form. It would have to become a more private experience, which means literacy would have to extend beyond the elite and monastic (religious) communities. Texts, too, would need to become more legible, with standardized punctuation and word spaces so that the mumbling of readers sounding out text, common through the sixth century, could disappear. And libraries designed for quiet, contemplative reading could then develop to serve this new readership.

British scribes, like those who crafted the Book of Kells (around 800 C.E.), played a key role in making text more accessible. They wrote in Latin, and because it was a second language, and one more challenging to sound out in continuous script, they introduced several changes to improve its legibility, including word separation (around 675 C.E.), additional punctuation, and simplified letterforms. Still, it took nearly four hundred years for these small innovations to spread. The translation of Arabic scientific writing into Latin in tenth-century Europe likely played a vital role in solidifying word separation, since it was inherent in the language (because unlike Greek and Latin, it is written in consonants). Translators kept Arabic word separation when rendering these texts in Latin, in part because it made the complex technical prose significantly more comprehensible.