{"id":197,"date":"2011-02-05T00:01:37","date_gmt":"2011-02-05T08:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=197"},"modified":"2011-04-03T21:44:43","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T04:44:43","slug":"lycian-600-bc-turkey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/05\/lycian-600-bc-turkey\/","title":{"rendered":"Lycian — 600 BC?, Turkey"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lycian nasalized "e"<\/p><\/div>\n

The Lycians lived in southwest Turkey, not far from Greece, but spoke a descendant of Luwian.\u00a0\u00a0 They made a new alphabet by adding a few characters to the Dorian dialect of the Greek\u00a0 alphabet.\u00a0 Some of the letters might have been pulled from the neighbouring Carian script<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Other writing systems had tried other word separators — vertical bars particularly were popular — but in my opinion those are not as useful.\u00a0 Some reading researchers believe that the Bouma shape<\/a> — essentially the outline of a word — is useful in word recognition.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It is easier to see the shape of the word if there is space delimiting it instead of a similar-looking symbol.<\/p>\n

It is very hard to read scripto continuo<\/em>, text without separation.\u00a0 It is telling that there is a moment in St. Augustine’s Confessions<\/em> where Augustine recounts his astonishment at discovering St. Ambrose reading silently, without even moving his lips.\u00a0 Augustine took this ability as a mark of unusual genius.<\/p>\n

We might laugh at the thought that reading liplessly is unusual, but try reading somethingthatisallsmooshedtogetherwithoutanypunctuationata llitisdifficultyoumightstartmovingyourlipstoo.<\/p>\n

UPDATE\/COMMENT: I hear that the above paragraph doesn’t render well at some point sizes.\u00a0 Sorry, but I can’t really fix it with WordPress.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia<\/a>, Ancient Scripts<\/a>, Omniglot<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Lycians lived in southwest Turkey, not far from Greece, but spoke a descendant of Luwian.\u00a0\u00a0 They made a new alphabet by adding a few characters to the Dorian dialect of the Greek\u00a0 alphabet.\u00a0 Some of the letters might have … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alphabet","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}