Page 96 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

focused on a limited and intensely scrutinized canon of litera- ture. Because those who read relished the mellifluous metrical and accentual patterns of pronounced text and were not inter- ested in the swift intrusive consultation of books, the absence of interword space in Greek and Latin was not perceived to be an impediment to effective reading, as it would be to the modern reader, who strives to read swiftly. Moreover, oralization, which the ancients savored aesthetically, provided mnemonic compensa- tion (through enhanced short-term aural recall) for the difficulty in gaining access to the meaning of unseparated text. Long-term memory of texts frequently read aloud also compensated for the inherent graphic and grammatical ambiguities of the languages of late antiquity. Finally, the notion that the greater portion of the population should be autonomous and self-motivated read- ers was entirely foreign to the elitist literate mentality of the ancient world. For the literate, the reaction to the difficulties of lexical access arising from scriptura continua did not spark the de- sire to make script easier to decipher, but resulted instead in the delegation of much of the labor of reading and writing to skilled slaves, who acted as professional readers and scribes. It is in the context of a society with an abundant supply of cheap, intellec- tually skilled labor that ancient attitudes toward reading must be comprehended . . . (Saenger, Space Between Words. The Origins of Silent Reading [1997], p. 11).48
Use of professional readers for reading and professional scribes for writ- ing brings up the topics of the interface between the reader and the book. In the ancient world, when an individual listened to a text read by a profes- sional reader, he or she was using an interface between the book and him- or herself. Similarly, when an individual scrawled out a text on wax tablets and turned it over to a scribe for transcription, or dictated a text to scribe
48 Regarding the importance of space between words for speeding up manuscript copying see Saenger, p 48.
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