> On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 10:41 PM, David
 > McCann<[log in to unmask]>wrote:

 >> There's a chapter on silent reading in that
 >> wonderful book "A history of reading" by Alberto
 >> Manguel.

Got to get my hands on that! :-)

 >> There are a number of references to silent
 >> reading in Antiquity, going back to Aristophanes and
 >> Euripides, but the practice seems to have become
 >> established in monastic scriptoria.

The classic account of course is Augusine's description
of his reaction to Ambrose reading silently: a bit of
alarm and disbelief, apparenly, dissolved only by the
obvious holiness of the man.

 >> Reading aloud to a group continued in families so
 >> long as light in the evenings was restricted to
 >> expensive candles, and in places like inns so long
 >> as there were illiterates who wanted to hear the
 >> news.

Certainly.  There is a nationalistic Icelandic painting
of an elderly man reading by a candle to the household
gathered around him, and I've seen 17th century
depictions of public reading of newspapers in inns.

 >> Scriptio continua was an increasing problem as the
 >> spoken and writen languages diverged, and it was
 >> customary to markup texts with punctuation, and
 >> guides to word boundaries when ambiguous.

Sure. After sending my previous post I noticed this
example of early Roman cursive which has interpuncts
between the word:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:I_littera_in_manuscripto.jpg>

(Probably the ugliest script that ever existed, BTW! :-)

 >> This had to be done by the owner: published books
 >> were produced by a roomful of slaves taking
 >> dictation, which was more rapidly done in scriptio
 >> continua.

Exactly. I also suspect that many of these slave
scribes simply weren't proficient enough in classical
Latin/Greek morphology to always be sure where the word
boundaries fell!  Anyway it's a good illustration of
the fact that there are no pauses between words in
speech even at rather slow speeds (although there may
be other phonological manifestations of boundaries).

 >> Word spacing was an Irish invention,

I wonder if this was exclusively so. Cursive scripts of
the Near East like Pahlavi, Syriac and Arabic would
have given rise to word spacing rather spontaneously, as
each word, or at least stress group, would consist of
connected letters and word boundaries be marked by pen
lifts.  The role of the wax tablet in the development
of non-interconnected Latin letters should not be
underestimated!

BTW (linguistically) Old Irish MSS have spaces only
between stress groups, clitics being written connected
to their head -- even proclitics.  Our present habit of
writing preverbs continuously probably owes its origin
to similar habits in medieval times. Prenominals aren't
any more stressed than preverbs are; the only real
difference I can perceive was that an adjective could
go between a preposition and a noun, while nothing
similar happened with preverbs. Another example is the
postposed article of North Germanic: it is written
connected although it is still a clitic rather than
a bound morph, at least in Icelandic and Faroese.

 >> and placing the spaces when transcribing texts lead
 >> to some lovely howlers, like "abas secrevit" for "ab
 >> asse crevit"!

Is that really a genuine example? :-)

  2011-05-03 23:13, Nikolay Ivankov skrev:

 > Well, the problem with scripto continua may have been
 > even more apparent in the areas where the material
 > for writing on it was expensive. AFAIK the
 > expensiveness of the pergament led to the
 > introduction of some characters that combined several
 > letters (the introduction of cyrillic letter "щ" form
 > "ш" and "т" written one above another is an example).

According to one hypothesis Щ was originally meant to
be the voiceless counterpart of Ђ, i.e. /tɕ/ or /tsʲ/
as the reflex of *tj while/where that was distinct from
both /ts/ as the reflex of the second and third
palatalizations and /tʃ/ as the reflex of the first
palatalization. This is all the more likely as Ђ as
used in the OCS MSS is an essentially syperfluous
letter, used corresponding to [gʲ]  in Greek loans,
while no similar device (e.g. something like the modern
para-Cyrillic Ӄ! :-) is found for Greek [kʲ]. The later
uses of Щ as a ligature and Ђ as a xenophone would then
only have arisen after /tɕ/ and /dʑ/ merged with /ts/
and /dz/. NB that the Glagolitic version of Щ *is*
derived from Ш but doesn't look anything like a ШТ
ligature; the same goes for the Glagolitic Ђ which
wasn't obviously derived from Glagolitic Г or Д either.
If Glagolitic Щ had been an ШТ ligature it would have
had two bowls under the Ш rather than one ring!

Here is a comparison for those who have font coverage
(the order being Glagolitic, Cyrillic, IPA for each):

Ⱋ Щ /tɕ/ Ⱎ Ш /ʃ/ Ⱅ Т /t/ Ⰼ Ђ /dʑ/ Ⰳ Г /g/ Ⰴ Д /d/

 > The introduction of "titlo" in OCS served the same
 > purpose, and only later became a symbol of sacrality
 > (something like "богъ" for a pagan god and «бг҃ъ» for
 > the God in Christianity).
 >

The practice was only adopted from Greek usage, and
found its way also into the Latin world (the very word
_titulus_ is Latin, BTW!)  E.g. _Iesus_ was written
_ihs_, with an abbreviation only one third
transliterated from Greek uncial ΙΗ(ΣΟΥ)Σ.

Old Icelandic MSS bristle with abbreviations and notae
in sacred and profane words alike; e.g. _hús_ 'house'
is routinely written _h9_ (or _hꝰ_ in proper Unicode)
with the nota for the Latin _-us_ ending! Parchment was
*very* scarce and expensive up there. Apparently they
preferred goat skin for parchment, sheep fur being in
more urgent demand for clothing. Still quite a few
sheep ended up as books, since they were in more
abundant supply. There are also examples of trying to
use seal skin for parchment, althoug the result seems
to have been of inferior quality. BTW a Pagan god was
always spelled _goð_ while the Christian God was
spelled _guð_, turning an originally dialectal
variation into a semantic. OTOH _guð_ retained its
neuter morphology although it took on masculine
agreement.

/bpj