The Space Between Words

From sixth century ireland, the craze for dividing words with spaces swept across the british isles and then europe as pilgrims and scholars on research trips took spaces with them. By about the twelfth century, scribes had pretty much figured out spaces to cram a couple of hundred years of major linguistic shifts into one short paragraph. Punctuation has been very influenced by spoken language. When it was first introduced, it was because reading was done out loud. Then that began to shift as reading became more private. You start to put in more things that help you to just make sense of it, rather than just to read it out blanklybl.