History of writing: Who was the Irish monk who invented the space between words?

This post is intended as a serious question, in the hope that some shipmate may know the answer, or, failing that, could at least suggest a suitable place to start looking for an answer. If Purgatory is the wrong forum for it, I would request a Host to be so kind as to move it to a more suitable forum.

It says here (link below) that the practice of putting spaces between words began at what was, for me, an amazingly late date: not until some time after St. Isidore of Seville introduced punctuation in or around the year 600. Whoever wrote this rather waffly history of punctuation doesn’t give any references. The bare words “Irish monks” are inadequate, I think, to identify the inventor or inventors of such a world-shaking innovation as the word separator in the form of a blank space.

Here is the relevant snippet, with my emphasis added:
… … …

Around 200 BCE, Aristophanes of Alexandria wished to ease pronunciation of Greek for foreigners by suggesting small circles at different levels of the line for pauses of different lengths, emphasising the rhythm of the sentence though not yet its grammatical shape. That would remain a task for the 7th-century churchman and encyclopaedist Isidore of Seville.
Isidore invented the period, comma and colon. He rethought Aristophanes’ punctuation, based on pauses when reading aloud, in terms of grammatical parts of the sentence: an utterance whose sense and grammar were complete would receive a dot at the top of the line, which would eventually migrate down to the bottom and become the full stop or period we know today. An utterance whose sense and grammar were complete but accommodated expansion would get a dot in the centre: the future colon. Lastly, an utterance that was neither complete in sense nor in grammar would be marked off with a dot at the bottom, evolving into the comma. Where previously only the full sentence received a boundary sign, it was now also possible to distinguish the constituents within. Isidore’s ideas circulated widely and, by the end of the same century, Irish monks had added spaces between words to his system of dots.

https://aeon.co/essays/beside-the-point-punctuation-is-dead-long-live-punctuation

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Comments

  • Dave WDave W Shipmate
    You might try Paul Saenger’s “Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading”; here’s one review. But the fact that no name was mentioned in your article to put beside Aristophanes and Isidore suggests to me that nobody knows exactly who started the practice.
  • jay_emmjay_emm Shipmate
    It is amazing how many steps in inventions we skip over particularly in the old ones (we kind of go Writing, Printing, Typewriters, Computers, iPad1, iPad2, iPad7.1, iPad7.2...). Such a lot happened in the middle ages that we take for granted (I suspect we're already seeing Typewriters being rounded out of history)

    To be honest I suspect the space was always latently there, what would be significant would be the ability to waste huge quantities of paper on literally nothing just to save the reader a little bit of time.
  • DavidDavid Shipmate
    I've read that the spaces were the work of Alcuin of York. He worked for Charlemagne, who was at best semi-literate, though he valued literacy. Alcuin standardised letter shapes in a new script, the Carolingian Minuscule, with distinct spaces before and after individual words in an effort to help Charlemagne to read more successfully.
  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    I remember a tale of a named Irish monk in Italy, possible later sainted, whose name I forget, but who amazed the locals by being able to read without reading out loud - and I suspect this may be related to the spaces.
  • MooMoo Kerygmania Host
    My impression is that we don't know the names of most Irish monks who worked on manuscripts. It was seen as a corporate effort.
  • WhoeverhewasitwasajollygoodideaIllgetmecoat...

    (One article I've seen - can't link to it, as it comes up as Error 404 - simply refers to *monks of Hibernia*. As @Dave W suggests, we'll probably never know any individual name or names).
  • MMMMMM Shipmate
    It wasn’t a ‘one time’ invention; the Hittites often left gaps between words 3,000-odd years ago.

    MMM
  • No fewer than seven responses within a couple of hours of posting my query! Thank you all very much. Yes, I suppose that, as @Moo points out, individual copyists wouldn't have been remembered by name for their contributions to what was essentially a collective endeavour. Nevertheless, I'd have expected some library somewhere to be aware that it holds the earliest extant manuscript Bible featuring word spacing. I'll try and get hold of Paul Saenger's book recommended by @DaveW.

    @MMM's information about the Hittites is interesting. It raises the question, why didn't the Greeks, Hebrews or Romans follow suit? Perhaps nobody ever learnt to read Hittite, other than the Hittites themselves ...
  • BroJamesBroJames Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host
    Penny S wrote: »
    I remember a tale of a named Irish monk in Italy, possible later sainted, whose name I forget, but who amazed the locals by being able to read without reading out loud - and I suspect this may be related to the spaces.
    A story like this is attributed to St. Ambrose.
  • MMMMMM Shipmate
    edited February 6
    That’s an interesting question, Ray Sunshine. It might just have been too long before. I think the Hittite empire fell in about 1150 BC.

    MMM

    Edited to add: I’ll give you three guesses as to what my lockdown project is...
  • DafydDafyd Shipmate
    BroJames wrote: »
    A story like this is attributed to St. Ambrose.
    It's an eyewitness account by St Augustine in his Confessions.

  • I seem to remember it being said about Jerome that he could (mirabile dictu!) read without moving his lips.

    "miraculously to say"
  • jay_emmjay_emm Shipmate
    I saw Codex Sinaiticus at the British Library, and your eyes just are hit by a wall letters (granted I don't read/speak Greek, but I'd have expected I could have moved my lips). It doesn't even look like writing as it is almost like print.
    It kind of left it a bit flat, as you just couldn't connect what you were seeing to anything, Jane Eyre was the one where I could go, "it's handwriting, but I've seen that before"
  • So what about texts from before 600? Did Old English, Norse, French, Hebrew, Greek ... not use spaces? Surely any alphabetic language or script which uses words must separate them?

    I can't say I bothered to read the OP or quoted text but is this serious question?
  • This is a tangent in this thread - but when the Romans spoke Latin, did they do so in the word order which I remember getting really f*cked-off with when floundering in O-Level all those years ago? And hang on - aren't ancient Latin inscriptions given with gaps between the words? I'm sure the odds and ends I have seen (for instance connected to Hadrian's Wall) have been laid out clearly enough, but I could be remembering wrong.
  • That's what I meant when I said in my OP that I found it amazing that word spacing was introduced at such a (comparatively) recent date. It seems such an obvious thing to do.
  • RicardusRicardus Shipmate
    According to Wikipedia (albeit a badly sourced article), Phoenician script separated words with some kind of mark (presumably this one) because the script only represented consonants - if you only have the consonants it's very difficult to break them up into words. The Greek alphabet has vowels, which made it easier to separate words without help. Latin used an interpunct (a midline dot) but this fell out of fashion for manuscripts (and on inscriptions, I guess would easily be hidden by weathering).

    Thinking about it, an interpunct as a word separator is clearer than a space and potentially takes up less, well, space, so the space as a word separator may not actually be that brilliant an idea ...
  • tclunetclune Shipmate
    edited February 6
    This text from the 10th century offers a fine illustration of what Ivan Illich refers to as the text as score in his essay on the development of modern books, In the Vineyard of the Text. FWIW

    ETA: the first link was intended to open the page "Gospel lectionary with ekphonetic notation" shown on the actual link. Apparently, that page is generated as needed. But do go to the image: it's worth the trip.
  • Pure SunshinePure Sunshine Shipmate
    edited February 6
    IIRC the reason why Irish speakers used word spacing was because Irish is not closely related to Latin and therefore had to be learned as a new language (whereas the emergent romance languages were close to Latin, and it was easier for their speakers to read it). Spaces helped with that. English speakers also adopted word spacing for the same reason.

    Afraid I can't remember exactly where I was read that, though...
  • edited February 6
    That’s quite something Tclune. Here’s a link to the (almost inevitable) book of Kells; I’ve selected a random page of text. It seems to be space delimited, but maybe a couple of hundred years older than the text in your link. Maybe the Scots were ahead on this approach, for reasons suggested in the post between us which was posted while I was following your link!

    (By the way, if you (pl) haven’t played with the book of kells online, follow that link, find your way to the index and thence to a heavily decorated page, and zoom in to your heart’s content. )
  • TelfordTelford Shipmate
    edited February 6
    This is a tangent in this thread - but when the Romans spoke Latin, did they do so in the word order which I remember getting really f*cked-off with when floundering in O-Level all those years ago? And hang on - aren't ancient Latin inscriptions given with gaps between the words? I'm sure the odds and ends I have seen (for instance connected to Hadrian's Wall) have been laid out clearly enough, but I could be remembering wrong.
    BIB...Yes
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    Dots between words quite often. Latin word order? You mean whatever the writer felt like and bugger any poor sod trying to understand it!
  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    Right, I don't know where I got that it was an Irish monk reading silently. I suspect my mind's back office deciding that it was related to the spaces without my conscious involvement. I have caught it out doing that before with two time separated articles in Scientific American about early mining, one in the Netherlands, one in Hungary. I was persuaded it was one article and had the dickens of a job finding what I was looking for.
  • DafydDafyd Shipmate
    So what about texts from before 600? Did Old English, Norse, French, Hebrew, Greek ... not use spaces? Surely any alphabetic language or script which uses words must separate them?
    No. I'm on my phone so I can't search up pictures. Most early manuscripts in Latin have no spaces. Bear in mind that Latin has case endings so it's often possible to recognise the end of a word that way. ButitispossibletoreadtextwithnospacesinEnglishtoo.

  • Not sure about an Irishman inventing spaces, but a Welshman invented the = (equals) sign...
  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    Back in the days when I was teaching, you could get collections of evidence from the period studied called Jackdaws. I had one on the Battle of Hastings, with some text from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Spaces beween the words.
  • jay_emmjay_emm Shipmate
    Dafyd wrote: »
    So what about texts from before 600? Did Old English, Norse, French, Hebrew, Greek ... not use spaces? Surely any alphabetic language or script which uses words must separate them?
    No. I'm on my phone so I can't search up pictures. Most early manuscripts in Latin have no spaces. Bear in mind that Latin has case endings so it's often possible to recognise the end of a word that way. ButitispossibletoreadtextwithnospacesinEnglishtoo.

    There's a lot of (Church) Latin as well and tidied up Latin.
    Enough to make the stuff that isn't seem like an exception.

    Especially as eye-balling, between the dots and gaps that while not proper character spaces, there often is something there in the genuine texts

    this one does look to have proper spaces
    this one seems to vary
    this one is pure dotted
    [
  • Your first link leads to a blank page (with the Ashmolean header). Plenty of space.
  • jay_emmjay_emm Shipmate
    edited February 6
    Blast, indeed.

    Here's one that looks to me like a wall of text.
    and here is another try at the spaced one

    They are all inscriptions. Books are liable to be different (more text). They are also less likely to be seen [by Mark in Manchester and other tourists with school Latin]

    One of Pratchetts books (Hogfather) makes the distinction between the "Sun Rising" and a "Ball of gas and flame illuminating the world". I think you could possibly do something similar, obviously the middle of the word isn't the best place for a gap, but that's not the same as having a space...
  • EnochEnoch Shipmate
    I too have heard this claim. I can remember where I heard it, but don't know the person making it got it from. I'm a bit doubtful. I've seen a Greek New Testament from c 800, produced in Greece, in which I happened to notice that the words were separated in much the same way as we would now. If splitting words was invented in Dark Age Ireland, either it struck everyone as instantly obvious - 'why didn't we think of this?' - or it spread amazingly quickly between areas hardly in contact and from the backward to the more civilised, which is unlikely. Even three hundred years would be quite quick for a diffusion in that direction.

  • @jay_emm — that one worked.
  • RicardusRicardus Shipmate
    Enoch wrote: »
    I too have heard this claim. I can remember where I heard it, but don't know the person making it got it from. I'm a bit doubtful. I've seen a Greek New Testament from c 800, produced in Greece, in which I happened to notice that the words were separated in much the same way as we would now. If splitting words was invented in Dark Age Ireland, either it struck everyone as instantly obvious - 'why didn't we think of this?' - or it spread amazingly quickly between areas hardly in contact and from the backward to the more civilised, which is unlikely. Even three hundred years would be quite quick for a diffusion in that direction.

    But that was the period when Irish missionaries were wandering all over Europe - St Columba and St Columbanus and so on. (Wikipedia again.) If they took the space with them, it could have been in Germany and Italy within a generation, and since the Byzantines were still contesting parts of Italy at that period, it could have migrated to Constantinople pretty quickly too.
  • Yeah, the categorisation of Ireland as a dark age backwater in this period is not really fair.
  • BoogieBoogie Shipmate
    This is really interesting.

    I’d never thought about it before. But, in speech, we don’t have spaces between words, only between phrases.
  • RicardusRicardus Shipmate
    ... Also, I guess in most of the places where Irish missionaries were active, the ruling classes would have spoken something Germanic even if the general population spoke something Latinate, and therefore they would have had greater need of 'reading aids' such as the space, for the reason given by @Pure Sunshine above.

    Iow, it is quite likely that the ruling classes in that era would have said "What a good idea!", whereas it would have been less impressive in earlier eras when the ruling classes all spoke Latin as their mother tongue.
  • Yeah, the categorisation of Ireland as a dark age backwater in this period is not really fair.

    The monasteries of Ireland are said to have been instrumental in keeping literacy (barely) alive in western Europe during the Dark Ages.
  • MMMMMM Shipmate
    .
  • Yeah, the categorisation of Ireland as a dark age backwater in this period is not really fair.

    The monasteries of Ireland are said to have been instrumental in keeping literacy (barely) alive in western Europe during the Dark Ages.
    And, moving into the 8th Century Vikings ensured that literacy could be exported back into the rest of western Europe and beyond, with extensive trade routes linking Scandinavia with Russia, Britain, Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa.
  • tclunetclune Shipmate
    If memory serves (and it often doesn't any more), it was Ivan Illich in the work I cited above who pointed out that there was a significant change besides spacing that was going on around this time: Up until around the millennium, each written language had its own alphabet -- Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Arabic. But around this time literary works began to emerge in local languages using the Latin alphabet. It is reasonable to suggest that this involves a reimagining of writing that brings a whole new level of abstraction to it. FWIW
  • jay_emmjay_emm Shipmate
    That to me makes a lot of sense both in terms of rethinking about what you are doing (and the need to be systematic about it). I'm sure to some extent that you get similar issues (and solutions) every time writing shifts a linguistic boundary.

    And at that point it's an export that by it's nature immediately jumps to anyone connected by trade, or working in linguistics. Probably more so than Latin on it's way out where if you make a concession for the barbarians you certainly don't show it when writing between civilised people.

    I'm still going to suspect there was also some writing material related change (it's too early for paper) around that time.
  • RicardusRicardus Shipmate
    AIUI in the Roman period local languages fell on something of a spectrum:

    1. Written in someone else's script - e.g. Gaulish is found in Latin, Greek and Etruscan characters
    2. Written in something that is clearly derived from someone else's script - e.g. Palaeohispanic languages from Phoenician, or Etruscan from Greek
    3. Written in something that may once have been (1) or (2) but which is now best seen as its own script - e.g. Greek, Hebrew

    The change in the post-Roman period seems to be that everyone now wants to take option (1) - even for langauges that already have their own script, such as runes or Ogham.

    I can imagine that if you are now using Latin characters for languages that have never previously done so, and which aren't very closely related to Latin, then you would want to make those characters as clear as possible.
  • Ricardus wrote: »
    AIUI in the Roman period local languages fell on something of a spectrum:

    1. Written in someone else's script - e.g. Gaulish is found in Latin, Greek and Etruscan characters

    I think I once read somewhere that, during the centuries when Britain was part of the Roman Empire, any Britons who were literate wrote only in Latin, never in their own Celtic language, which was never written down, remaining a spoken language only. Can you confirm this? And, if so, is the reason known? If, on the other side of the Channel, Gaulish became a written language, why not British too?
  • I was rather shocked to learn just recently that Galatian is classified as a Celtic language. I wonder if they used the Greek alphabet to write it.

    But to throw more worms into this bucket, Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet and spaces--but those spaces come between syllables, not between words. Meaning that if you have a multisyllabic word, your new language learner isn't going to be able to tell where one word ends and another begins--and will annoy her teacher, asking him what "su" means (in this case, it's the rear end of "muc su," meaning "pastor").
  • I was rather shocked to learn just recently that Galatian is classified as a Celtic language.
    My recollection is that the Galatians were originally Gauls.
  • Doc TorDoc Tor Admin
    edited February 7
    I was rather shocked to learn just recently that Galatian is classified as a Celtic language. I wonder if they used the Greek alphabet to write it.

    But to throw more worms into this bucket, Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet and spaces--but those spaces come between syllables, not between words. Meaning that if you have a multisyllabic word, your new language learner isn't going to be able to tell where one word ends and another begins--and will annoy her teacher, asking him what "su" means (in this case, it's the rear end of "muc su," meaning "pastor").

    I have recently had to put Latinised Akkadian back into its original petroglyphs. If each syllable had its own symbol, it would have been easy, but there are separate (and unrelated) symbols for single letters, syllables, and compound phonemes comprising of two or more syllables. Also, Akkadian (at least the bits I'm looking at) doesn't have spaces. Also, some symbols are simply signifiers and aren't pronounced at all.
  • Things moved fairly rapidly between parts of the Christian world. Look at how people were naming their kids after a saint on one side of Europe well within a century of the saint dying on the other side of Europe.
  • MMMMMM Shipmate
    Doc Tor, do you mean cuneiform? I wasn’t aware Akkadian ever used petroglyphs - cuneiform was formed by cut reeds impressed on wet clay.

    MMM
  • I mean, these are stone stele, not clay. But cuneiform is what I was reaching for.
  • MMMMMM Shipmate
    Thinking about it, I suppose you do see cuneiform carved onto basalt etc. Are you actually carving/restoring stele?

    I did Akkadian for less than a year and, yes, found it pretty much more complicated in its script than its grammar.

    MMM
  • Alan29Alan29 Shipmate
    I'm not sure that historians refer to the "dark" ages any more.
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