Actually, Chris, some earlier chirographic "technology" recorded intonation
better than we can today with typewritten text; it captured rhythms better by
the way it clumped and spaced words and sized individual letters along the
horizontal axis (we could approximate this, and modern poetry does do this
sometimes); it differentiated between and among phones better by having
differently shaped letters for various shadings of, say, the "a" phoneme, as in
ModE father, cat, wait, say, or British 'actually', or between voiced and
unvoiced consonants  (we can't do this, because spelling reforms have collapsed
the variation, and spelling is now no longer phonemic, though there are vestiges
-- rough spots for foreigners who are learning the language -- or should I have
written ruf spots for fariners lerning the langwidch?); and  it even captured
relative volumes by graphemic variation along the vertical axis. A number of
early medieval manuscripts show evidence of these conventions.
 
Tim Romano
 
"Booth, Christopher" wrote:
 
> It is an easy enough misunderstanding to have. Ancient Greek also had no
> punctuation, and as I have read, no word spaces early on. This information
> would have been encountered in any consideration of Homer, which Pound--and
> Joyce--both make requisite. Of course, the lack of line spaces would make
> rhythm and rhyme necessary to interpret written streams of phonetic
> characters....
>
> Word spaces are a newer technology than alphanumeric characters, and
> punctuation a much newer yet. [Personally, I love the algebraic precision of
> modern punctuation; it allows for more intonation and phrasing to be
> included in writing than any earlier technology of transcribing written
> speech, and modern poetry (Hopkins and Carroll and after) with its line
> breaks and indentations, etc., allows for yet more. It eats a bit off the
> old ambiguities, but gives us a richer music--I think.]      :-)
>
> Chris Booth
>
> > ----------
> > From:         Yakob Leib ha Kohain [Jacob Leib Cohen, Ph.D.]
> > Reply To:     [log in to unmask]
> > Sent:         Thursday, March 11, 1999 10:17 AM
> > To:   [log in to unmask]
> > Subject:      Re: that centaur ant
> >
> > N. Scott Reynolds wrote:
> >
> > >the Hebrew bible has no spaces to
> > > delineate the words, reputably to enable myriad interpretations.
> >
> > YAKOV LEIB REPLIES:
> >
> > I'm afraid that's not entirely true. What you're referring to, I think,
> > is that the "Hebrew Bible" (i.e., Torah) has no _punctuation_ to
> > delineate _sentences_, not that it has no "spaces" to delineate "words."
> >
> > I have a Torah Scroll (i.e., the "Hebrew Bible" to which you refer) in
> > front of me at this very moment and, I assure you, it is not one, long
> > uninterupted string of Hebrew letters but one long, uninterupted
> > _sentence_. May I ask the source of your information?
> >
> > JLC
> >