[Retric]

Double spacing between paragraphs is surprisingly helpful with smudged text on physical paper. Many linguistic conventions seem arbitrary, but are really about redundancy.

Punctuation could have replaced spaces.just like capitalization of the first letter in a new sentence,it’s helpful to make things as obvious as possible. Is that period a typo or are those supposed to be different sentences?

[JadeNB]

It basically did, except the other way around: punctuation was originally used where we would use spaces now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#Western_Antiquity