Re: Old Languages

Quoting Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>:

> At 5:35 pm -0400 9/10/01, Amber Adams wrote:
> > I know that's not the case for Modern Hindi, it uses spaces between
> > words.
> >
> > But that's really interesting for Sanskrit... that system would work
> > ok for reading out loud, but what about silently?  Or was it like a lot
> > of other old written languages, where people just didn't read
> > silently...?
>
> How do we know they didn't?
>
> That Classical Latin distinguished between _recitare_ "to read out
> aloud" and _legere_ "to observe [a document], to peruse, to read" suggests to
> me that people did at least read Latin silently 2000 years ago.
[...]

> It's true that in post-Augustan Latin one will find _legere_ also used
> of reading aloud; but the earlier distinction seems clear enough.
FWIW, there's a short passage in one of Augustine's many works
where Augustine is going to meet St. Ambrose of Milan, and finds him
in his study intently reading a book silently to himself, the very
silence of which surprised him.  Some have taken this as evidence that
most people did not read silently in the way we take "silent reading"
to mean today, but rather at best they read whispering it to oneself.

==============================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...>

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