"Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading" by Paul Saenger

It is an expensive book, $82.95 from Amazon.  It is clearly not a best seller but it is interesting.  I have had it on my shelf for years, like many other books that attract me but always get pushed aside.  The book is about the history of written words and their de-coding by readers. 

It says that until about 700 AD, words were strung together likethesewordshavebeen.  In Latin class, we had text that had no capital letters and no punctuation.  We spend lots of time puzzling out where a given sentence actually began and where it ended.  But we never had to face all the individual letters being strung together.  About 700 AD, Irish monks started using the convention of leaving a small space between words and that convention made it easier for readers to read.  They didn't have to use their voices to experiment with which letters were meant to go together and silent reading was possible.  Until then, a room of readers was not silent.

Two new versions of our language are springing up.  Maybe more than 2 but the ones I have run into are the language used to communicate in the limited characters of license plates and the shorter version of language used in sending text messages.  So, we get "D8" to be read hopefully as "date" and "LOL" for "laughing out loud".

Saenger says that phonetic languages like the European ones take longer to decode than ideographic ones like Chinese.  The Chinese symbol for marriage means directly while our arrangement of symbols "m-a-r-r-i-a-g-e" means the word beginning with the "m" sound.  Our heads have to go through the process of reading the symbols to get the sound and then remember that sound-word means "marriage".