Human communication
Word spacing — evidence how individuals can shape the future
Designing language, the web, and civilization
The web is changing, from flat screen to the spatial. Word spacing is a universal design motif, you rely on it everytime your spacebar is tapped. The true story behind it is a lesson in shaping the future. More than 7,000 human languages are spoken today, 30,000 in human history, and there are 300+ computer languages. Coding language is potential power, language is common, greatness in language, in creativity is uncommon.
Word separation — Athens, Rome, Ireland
In the West, reading silently and rapidly is due to the evolution of word separation introduced by Irish Saints and scribes from the 7th century. The format of the written page changed forever. Words often lead back to Rome and Athens, the Latinized alphabet and a Greek source. The space between words, brings you to Ireland. Ancient writings from Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, and Israel did not employ vowels so word separation was retained. For Mediterranean antiquity, vowel adoption and ‘scriptura continua’ (writing without spaces/marks between words) went hand in hand.
Word separation was absent among Ancient Greek and Latin grammarians. The Romans discarded word separation as superfluous, substituting ‘scriptura continua’ for interpunct-separated script in the 2nd century.
In the 7th and 8th centuries, scribes in Irish established monasteries to avoid the ambiguity of continuous script and to facilitate rapid decoding, introduced important adjuncts to script -including accentuation and word spacing. Adomnan’s book ‘Vita Columbae,’ ‘Life of Saint Columba’ (c 700 AD) and the ‘Book of Kells’ (c 800 AD) demonstrate Latin word separation.
Spreading literacy, Saving cognition
These design and grammatical techniques became standard in Irish monasteries, later spreading to the Continent. Word separation, the diastole, and the hyphen in Insular Irish books provided shortcuts for achieving the reading skills antiquity’s elites mastered via arduous focus.
They needed to speak out loud to comprehend. Reading slowly and orally, for 500 years word separation was the readers work. Paul Saenger’s work, published by Stanford University Press, provides these findings.
“Word separation, by altering the neurophysiological process of reading, simplified the act of reading, enabling both the medieval and modern reader to receive silently and simultaneously the text and encoded information that facilitates both comprehension and oral performance promoting rapid visual reading.”
Quantitative gains in silent reading
Without spaces to use for guideposts, readers need double the normal quantity of occular fixations and saccades (eye movement between points) per printed line text.
“Experiments on adult English-speaking readers confirm the total suppression or partial obfuscation of spatial boundaries between words increases the duration of the cognitive activity necessary for reading.”
Scriptura continua readers need more ocular regressions to identify words. With word spacing now the task of the scribe, people could read faster, easier, and silently. Silent reading emboldened readers.
Culture of resistance, Milestones to success
Saenger notes a ‘culture of resistance’ to separated script, like a sin against good design. It threatened the perceived power interests and the status quo. Word separation adoption milestones include;
- Monte Cassino, middle age Benedictine reform — word spacing became standard.
- Claude Shannon, father of the information age, elevated word spacing in a fundamental text for understandings today’s digital communication of 1s and 0s.
“In all cases we have assumed a 27-symbol ‘alphabet,’ the 26 letters and a space” — A mathematical theory of communication, 1948.
Shape human communication
These few individuals saw communication in a new light. They achieved the ideal of design, remaining within, behind, beyond the handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, beyond language.
The space between words leads you to Ireland, where art historian Kenneth Clark said “civilization survived by the skin of its teeth.”
So successful in time it has filtered across different languages, in different places. Every tap of your space bar is a silent reminder.
The web is metamorphosing, there is no better time to shape human communication again.
Mesopotamia-Phoenicia-Israel-Athens-Rome-Ireland-America
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