Lycian nasalized "e"
The Lycians lived in southwest Turkey, not far from Greece, but spoke a descendant of Luwian. They made a new alphabet by adding a few characters to the Dorian dialect of the Greek alphabet. Some of the letters might have been pulled from the neighbouring Carian script.
The glyphs that they used are not hugely interesting, but what the Lycians put between the glyphs was: as near as I can tell, Lycian was the first script to ever put spaces between words.
Other writing systems had tried other word separators — vertical bars particularly were popular — but in my opinion those are not as useful. Some reading researchers believe that the Bouma shape — essentially the outline of a word — is useful in word recognition. Thus your eye might recognize a word that has tall-letter, short-letter, tall, tall, short as the word “little” even without looking carefully at each letter. It is easier to see the shape of the word if there is space delimiting it instead of a similar-looking symbol.
It is very hard to read scripto continuo, text without separation. It is telling that there is a moment in St. Augustine’s Confessions where Augustine recounts his astonishment at discovering St. Ambrose reading silently, without even moving his lips. Augustine took this ability as a mark of unusual genius.
We might laugh at the thought that reading liplessly is unusual, but try reading somethingthatisallsmooshedtogetherwithoutanypunctuationata llitisdifficultyoumightstartmovingyourlipstoo.
UPDATE/COMMENT: I hear that the above paragraph doesn’t render well at some point sizes. Sorry, but I can’t really fix it with WordPress. If I remove the space in the middle of the last sentence, it becomes all one line, with no wrapping, which can run into the right column.
One thing that I have been intrigued by as I have learned about writing systems is how significantly technology affects the writing system; I am amused that the technology I use to write this blog prevents me from displaying Latin script in the form that Latin script started out in!
Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot
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