[tialaramex]

This used to be normal in a lot of the world, which is pretty wild. Lots of weird changes like this, Floppy Disks, "Appointment Television", home phone numbers ...

For most of recorded human history literacy was rare. A typical Roman citizen could not read, certainly beyond the ability to understand a handful of marks or make their name. By the nineteenth century it is entirely unremarkable that Patrick Brontë's daughters are taught to read and write, but it is also entirely unremarkable that several of them† died of TB since at the time we didn't know a cure for it.

† It's contested whether, for example, Charlotte died of TB, it probably didn't help.