alt Hacker NewsSometime after 685 AD, they invented spaces between words. All text - in Latin to that point, mostly - was written in scriptio continua.
All sorts of ambiguity and hilarity would ensue; to be a good writer, you needed to ensure that words didn't bleed together and form incorrect meanings in unintended combinations. If you lost your place when reading, you'd have to know generally where you were in a scroll, and restart from a place you remembered.
Kinda crazy to think how difficult it would be to cross reference things and do collaborative research with no spaces or pages.
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Hittite was putting spaces between words in the 17th century BCE. And if we're just interested in Latin, it used the interpunct as a word divider hundreds of years before the use of the space as word divider happened. The use of scriptio continua despite knowledge of word dividers was a choice.
Also kind of crazy how long “but that’s the way we’ve always done it” can remain the dominant system, despite a revolutionary change being so trivially achievable. This required absolutely no technological advancement, literally just putting a little more space between letters to reduce ambiguity.
yeah - under certain "the winners write the history" framework, I believe that scribes did not add spaces between "words".. However, the world is a big place; history is long.
i've had lots of Latin, know what you mean, but then thought of the Pantheon, where the word breaks (acronyms included) are indicated (with interstitial dots).
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pantheon_Rom_1_cropp...