Svenbro - Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece

Some modern theorists on reading in the modern and ancient world want to view the act, process and social position of reading from a modern position. What Svenbro manages in this volume is to make clear just how different the social position of reading was in ancient Greece. The debate around silent reading seems to produce violent reactions because, I believe, modern theorists do not want their heroes viewed as somehow deficient, and maintaining that Plato or Plutarch had to, at least, subvocalise when reading or, at worst, always read aloud is liking calling them dunces (put on the cone-shaped hat & stand in the corner Plato!). Svenbro makes very clear that the social stigma attached to reading aloud simply did not exist in ancient Greece. In fact, writing was only seen as a (poor) replacement for the voice. The role of the written word was to produce a voice, and only when the ear caught the words could a meaning be reproduced. This was so important to the Greeks that myths were developed to separate Greek writing from its Phoenician roots. Unlike other commentators, however, Svenbro disagrees that the ancients could not read silently. It was possible (although the form of writing in scriptura continua made it far less efficient than modern spaced writing), but it was very unusual and was only practiced by scholars, playwrights or poets that had to read a lot of text. Svenbro deduces all of this from original documents, placing particular emphasis on inscriptions on statues that announce themselves to the reader as well as extracts of plays and poetry.

Yep. You guessed it - also available as a Goodreads review.

Pause and Effect

An exquisite volume of scholarship. The text combines a history of punctuation in the West, as a narrative based almost entirely on evidence from original manuscripts, with copious notes and samples of manuscripts that come complete with original text, translations into modern English and a commentary on the importance of the manuscript to the development of punctuation.

Parkes reveals the correlation of historical conditions leading to changing functions for written English with the changes in type and function of punctuation marks, identifying where and how historical changes produced the current merging of written-to-be-spoken and written-to-be-read-silently punctuation marks and practices.

Another goodreads.com review.

An original copy of this book, published by Scolar Press, was kindly provided by KUSTAR as a British Library loan. It is also available online from Ashgate.com, who have reprinted and republished it. The new edition is a great improvement: the manuscripts and documents are so much clearer than in the previous edition. Here is what Ashgate have to say about the book:

From its publication in 1992 Pause and Effect has become a cornerstone of the study of punctuation across the world. Described as 'magisterial' by Lynne Truss in her best-selling Eats, Shoots and Leaves, this book has stimulated interest and scholarly debates among writers, literary critics, philosophers, linguists, rhetoricians, palaeographers and all those who study the use of language. To celebrate this extraordinary achievement, Pause and Effect has been republished in September 2008, coinciding with the publication of the author's new work, Their Hands Before Our Eyes.
The first part of Pause and Effect identifies the graphic symbols of punctuation and deals with their history. It covers the antecedents of the repertory of symbols, as well as the ways in which the repertory was refined and augmented with new symbols to meet changing requirements. The second part offers a short general account of the principal influences which have contributed to the ways in which the symbols have been applied in texts, focusing on the evidence of the practice itself rather than on theorists. The treatment enables the reader to compare usages in different periods, and to isolate the principles which underlie the use of punctuation in all periods.
The examples and plates which are at the core of the book provide the reader with an opportunity to test the author's observations. The examples are taken from a wide range of literary texts from different periods and languages. Latin texts are accompanied by English translation intended to illustrate the use of punctuation in the originals in so far as this is possible.

Go for the jugular

Start as you mean to go on...
The first topic of discussion for this blog about LLL starts with the sentence.
The sentence was mainly created in the minds of language theorists for the benefit of teachers and linguists.
To be more specific, the sentence can only operate in the context of modern writing, especially writing with punctuation marks. Sentences are literally defined by punctuation and commas. However, we never speak full stops or commas. That means that before we wrote language down, before we used punctuation, we never had full stops or commas because we never say them. This means we did not have the concept of a sentence before we wrote language down.

Of course, it may be that we did not discover sentences until later, but when we look at how we speak and how we write we find that language is structured quite differently. Write down a natural conversation and try to work out where to put the full stops. In a lot of cases, it is almost impossible to decide what a sentence is, in the traditional sense that we are to write, Some linguists like to imagine that the written form of the language is the true or 'pure' form and that spoken language is generally a degenerate form. However, the opposite must be true as (phylogenetically) all human cultures have developed some form of spoken language, but not all have written forms, and not all forms of written language construct sentences defined by punctuation. Further, (ontogenetically) we all speak before we write - and not all of us manage to write.
In short, linguists are obsessed with the written form - see Per Linell's book "The Written Language Bias in Linguistics" for more detail.
If we look at the history of the written form of the English language (and most western European scripts) we can trace the beginnings of punctuation to a corresponding shift to silent reading.
That is, punctuation is designed to help readers so that they can read silently rather than having to read aloud. In earlier centuries, western European written scripts were a string of continuous letters, known from antiquity as scriptura continua.
The only way that people knew how to read at that time as aloud. Our image of "murmuring monks" is derived from the practice that without voicing the script, the scribes in ancient monasteries could not make any sense of what they were copying. Paul Saenger has looked at this in great detail in his book published by Stanford University Press.
To be continued...