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  Small JP:  HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF WRITING AND READING
             Commentary on Skoyles on Reading

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psycoloquy.92.3.61.reading.10.small            Monday, November 2, 1992
ISSN 1055-0143                  (9 paragraphs, 9 references, 201 lines)
PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA)
                Copyright 1992 Jocelyn Penny Small

        HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF WRITING AND READING
                Commentary on Skoyles on Reading

                Jocelyn Penny Small
        U.S. Center Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae
                Alexander Library
                Rutgers University
                New Brunswick, NJ 08903
                JPSMALL@CANCER.RUTGERS.EDU

1.1  I am a classical archaeologist who has recently become interested
in considering classical antiquity from a cognitive point of view. I
think an understanding of the early development of the visual display
of "alphabetic" languages may be of interest to those trying to
understand the way we read today (Skoyles 1991).

1.2  Skoyles (1992) raises the issue of Hebrew, which is written in two
forms today: with diacritical marks for vowels (pointed) and with just
the consonants (unpointed). He writes that "all Israeli children start
off reading pointed text, in spite of its being more complex (and
different) visually, compared to unpointed text. Attempts to teach
children without the indication of vowels by diacritics have not been
successful." Hebrew in antiquity and now is written with breaks
(spaces) between the words.

1.3  When the Greeks took over the Phoenician alphabet, however, they
radically changed the display. Classical Greek was written in a
continuous script with no breaks in an absolute sense: none for
paragraphs, sentences, phrases, or words. In short, there was no
punctuation whatsoever. Latin sometimes (and especially in
inscriptions) separated words with "dots" or "points" (interpuncts),
but in the second century A.D., in one of those great misbegotten
regressions, it adopted the "scriptura continua" of the Greeks. In
other words, the addition of vowels by the Greeks made words
sufficiently distinctive to allow them to be run together and still be
understood. If unpointed Hebrew were written all run together, it would
be a nightmare to read. The diacritics, like the vowels, add
information that makes the decoding easier, even if they are
unnecessary or redundant to the expert. For this reason, classical
Greek is now printed with diacritical marks.

1.4  Antiquity did not recognize the separation of the visual and aural
aspects of text that enable us to treat print and speech differently.
Seneca believed that separating words, as Latin sometimes did, denoted
a stylistic difference between the Romans and the Greeks not just in
writing, but also in speaking:

      The pace of Quintus Haterius, a celebrated speaker of his day, is
      something I should have a sensible man keep well clear of: with
      him there was never a hesitation or a pause, only one start and
      only one stop.

      But I also think that certain styles are suitable in a greater or
      lesser degree to different nationalities. In a Greek one will
      tolerate this lack of discipline, while we have acquired the
      habit of punctuating what we say, in writing as well as speech.
      (Seneca, Letters, 40.11-12)

The idea that writing in its physical layout should reflect the rhythm
of speech foreshadows modern poets with their special printing
effects. What is curious is that Seneca found the run-on style a
strain to understand, saw a connection between writing and speech, and
never thought of reforming the way Latin was written.

1.5  Antiquity knew the concept of the word as a unit of speech, but
did not consider important the concept of the written word as a visual
unit, with the result that children learned how to read solely by
phonetics and not by the whole word. Consider Dionysius of
Halicarnassus' description of how children learn to read:

      When we are taught to read, first we learn by heart the names of
      the letters, then their shapes and their values, then, in the
      same way, the syllables and their effects, and finally words and
      their properties, by which I mean the ways they are lengthened,
      shortened, and scanned; and similar functions. And when we have
      acquired knowledge of these things, we begin to write and read,
      syllable by syllable and slowly at first.  It is only when a
      considerable lapse of time has implanted firmly in our minds the
      forms of the words that we execute them with the utmost ease, and
      we read through any book that is given to us unfalteringly and
      with incredible confidence and speed.

Never in antiquity was the whole word method used to teach reading.
Because all the letters were run together, the major problem every
reader faced was figuring out what was a word. The only way to do that
is syllable by syllable. This fact has a number of implications and not
just for reading. For example, I think that the arranging of words in
unbroken blocks impeded the development of our rich set of textual
search aids, because most of these aids depend on the individual word.
If you want to find something in a dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia,
almanac, or most any reference, you look it up by the unit of the word.

1.6  Each element in our current repertory of punctuation marks has a
separate introduction and each has generally taken a minimum of one
hundred years to be fully adopted. Conversely, there are definite
limits to the amount of punctuation and variety in arrangement of words
that are useful in increasing our understanding of a written text.

                          For example,
                    experiments have been done
                with the "visual chunking" of text
                 to see whether such arrangements
		   would increase comprehension.

They do not, except for poor readers (Crowder & Wagner 1992, 23-24)

1.7  Erasmus (1466?-1536), writing in a period when punctuation was
still a novelty, puts it extremely well:

      Just as the principle of symmetry, when properly applied, makes
      great improvement in the appearance of script, so you would
      hardly credit how much good punctuation contributes to the
      understanding of a passage; so much so that a certain scholar
      said rather wittily that punctuation was a kind of commentary of
      the text. It is useful therefore that a boy should quickly
      familiarize himself with this feature also, and that the habit
      should become second nature so that, even when his mind is on
      something else, he should, as he writes, attend to the
      punctuation marks as much as to the letters themselves.
      (Quoted in Saenger & Heinlein 1991, 255 n. 59)

I believe that the development of full punctuation, as we have it
today, is directly related to the switch between reading texts out
loud, as was the general practice in antiquity, and reading them
silently, as became increasingly common through the Middle Ages.
Saenger (1990, 54-55; 1982, 377-379) maintains that the adoption of
word separation began first in the British Isles because readers there
learned Latin as a second language and needed the extra help of the
spaces to parse Latin texts into words. It may also be of interest to
know that Greek often used the verb "akouein" ("to hear") in contexts
where it must mean "to read" (Schenkeveld 1992).

1.8  Today the computer raises new issues concerning how much
information is necessary to understand a particular text:

      Cn u rd ths? F u cn, thn u cn str mor txt n ls spc.

In other words, text, as we are accustomed to seeing it, contains a lot
of redundancy, which enables us to understand it far more quickly. The
trade-off is between time to decode and the amount of storage space
needed:

      F u hv t tm, thn u cn rd stff lk ths.

If you don't, you prefer whole words with complete punctuation.
Otherwise we would all be reading "zipped" files. Claude Shannon
calculated that written English is about 50% redundant. The issue,
however, is not whether you can read such a format, but whether you
want to or should have to. Hence when Skoyles (1992) calls the
"pointed" form of Hebrew more complex, he is considering it solely
visually rather than from the point of view of information theory, in
which it is simpler just because it is more elaborate in display.

2.0 CONCLUSION

2.1  I have given a very brief sketch of the early visual display of
"alphabetic" language that I think leads to three conclusions: First,
in alphabetic cultures there has been a slow development towards an
increasing visualization of written language. Second, as the way
language is displayed changes, so does the way it must be processed.
Third, because of the second conclusion, I do not think the study
of reading can be divorced from the way language is written, which
means that if a computer model is to be of significant help in
understanding human processing, it will have to closely model the input
that humans use.

REFERENCES

Crowder, R.G. and Wagner, R.K. (1992) The Psychology of Reading. An
Introduction, 2nd Edition. Oxford University Press.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus. On Literary Composition, 25.
Translation from the Loeb Classical Library.

Saenger, P. (1982) Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script
and Society. Viator 13: 367-414.

Saenger, P (1990) The Separation of Words and the Order of Words: The
Genesis of Medieval Reading. Scrittura e Civilta 14: 49-74.

Saenger, P. and Heinlein, M. (1991) Incunable Description and Its
Implication for the Analysis of Fifteenth-Century Reading Habits. In:
S. L. Hindman (ed.), Printing the Written Word. The Social History of
Books, circa 1450-1520. Cornell University Press. Pp. 225-258.

Schenkeveld, D. M. (1992)  Prose Usages of AKOYEIN "To Read." Classical
Quarterly 42: 129-141.

Seneca. Letters from a Stoic (trans. R. Campbell) (Harmondsworth 1969).

Skoyles, J. R. (1991) Connectionism, Reading and the Limits of
Cognition. PSYCOLOQUY 2(8) reading.1.

Skoyles, John R. (1992) Not All Phonological Reading Need Use Accurate
Letter-Sound Rules. PSYCOLOQUY 3(6) reading.7.