Alexander Humez
Auteur van ABC Et Cetera: The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet
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(eng) Family name pronounced “HyuMAY”
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- Harvard College
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- Family name pronounced “HyuMAY”
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“The empowerment afforded by solitary silent reading is hard to overestimate. In the world of scriptura continua, the monk or scholar had to read aloud, usually as a member of a group, affording him no opportunity to stop, consider, or analyze. The silent reader had not only all these advantages, but also the ability to compose, fluently, in spaced writing. Most critically, having to dictate to a scribe took away the author’s privacy, since it required two participants. Eliminating the need for scribes gave rise to the newly widespread expression of seditious and sexual content. In the world of scriptura continua, Church authorities could control the reading of controversial texts. By contrast, silent reading of spaced text allowed scholars and monks at-will access to and independent analysis of these works. Spaced text snatched access to books from abbots or bishops and handed it to the monk, the student, and the researcher, who “could peruse knowledge while keeping their thoughts to themselves.
***
“Solitary writing not only increased the power of individuals, but also improved their ability to impart ideas and knowledge to students, and it especially transformed the educational process. The classroom of scriptura continua involved reading aloud on a grand scale. The new spaced script enabled the educator to separate the lecture.
The sum total of things wrought by the humble blank space between words—the ease of both reading and composition; the improved efficiency of copying and of education; and the control, autonomy, and privacy afforded the individual—is such that the Reformation and Enlightenment would scarcely have been possible without it*. All that was needed was the means to print the words surrounding those spaces, and the paper to print them on.”
* “Saenger, Paul, Space Between Words (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 249–250, 258–276. The “Saenger hypothesis,” that the advent of spaced script precipitated an explosion of literary activity and social change, though well accepted by paleographers and linguists, is not without its critics. See, for example, Michael Richter, untitled review, American Historical Review 106:2 (April 2001): 627–628; and Mark Aronoff, untitled review, Language in Society 31:4 (Septemeber 2002): 624-628.”
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