History of writing: Who was the Irish monk who invented the space between words?
Ray Sunshine
Shipmate
in Purgatory
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
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
Comments
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.
(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).
MMM
@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 ...
MMM
Edited to add: I’ll give you three guesses as to what my lockdown project is...
"miraculously to say"
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"
I can't say I bothered to read the OP or quoted text but is this serious question?
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 ...
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.
Afraid I can't remember exactly where I was read that, though...
(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. )
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
[
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...
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.
I’d never thought about it before. But, in speech, we don’t have spaces between words, only between phrases.
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.
The monasteries of Ireland are said to have been instrumental in keeping literacy (barely) alive in western Europe during the Dark Ages.
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.
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.
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?
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.
MMM
I did Akkadian for less than a year and, yes, found it pretty much more complicated in its script than its grammar.
MMM