Re: Old Languages

   I don't know, honestly. However, Sanskrit shows a lot of linguistic
planning in the alphabet, so this probably made sense to them.
   As a "sort-of example", in Japanese, written text is one continuous
string of characters. When we asked our sensei about this (college class),
he said, "You don't break what you say when speaking. So why when writing?".
I would imagine there was a similar mentality in Sanskrit.

-----Original Message-----
From: Amber Adams
Subject: Re: Old Languages

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...?

On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 05:13:02PM -0400, Karapcik, Mike wrote:
>         Sanskrit, and I think Hindi, break the line of text with
certain
> "stop-consonants". Basically, the writing stops where you would close
/ stop
> moving your mouth. Thus, you can get two words and part of a third
strung
> together, and a break within the third word, break within the fourth,
and so
> on. (The breaks are phonetic rather than grammatical.)

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