[observationist]

Sometime after 685 AD, they invented spaces between words. All text - in Latin to that point, mostly - was written in scriptio continua.

All sorts of ambiguity and hilarity would ensue; to be a good writer, you needed to ensure that words didn't bleed together and form incorrect meanings in unintended combinations. If you lost your place when reading, you'd have to know generally where you were in a scroll, and restart from a place you remembered.

Kinda crazy to think how difficult it would be to cross reference things and do collaborative research with no spaces or pages.

[wl]

Hittite was putting spaces between words in the 17th century BCE. And if we're just interested in Latin, it used the interpunct as a word divider hundreds of years before the use of the space as word divider happened. The use of scriptio continua despite knowledge of word dividers was a choice.

[observationist]

I wonder, how much was gatekeeping, keeping things hard on purpose, how much waas inertia, "that's just the way things are done", and how much was a kind of despairing "holy shit, it'd be so much work to have to go through and recopy everything in the new format, literally decades of effort, and there's other things we want to do with our lives".

The whole context of written words had so much implicit process and knowledge and institutional memory, compared to now when we have petabytes of throwaway logs and trivial scratchpads for software running on a "just in case I might need to figure something out" basis. I'd love to see a written word graph over time, starting ~4k BC to now. And the complexity and diversity of those automated words are going up like crazy since LLMs.

[duskwuff]

Also probably a bit of "good parchment is expensive, why would we waste it on blank space?"

[datsci_est_2015]

Also kind of crazy how long “but that’s the way we’ve always done it” can remain the dominant system, despite a revolutionary change being so trivially achievable. This required absolutely no technological advancement, literally just putting a little more space between letters to reduce ambiguity.

[Ekaros]

English is good example. It has not been fixed for long while. Even if there would be so many better ways to write certain words.

[HappMacDonald]

I feel like Mathematical notation is also a great example (since Math is ultimately a separate language: the language of measurement)

It's been built up over centuries where new innovations and shifts in perspective often create new kinds of notation, but those most frequently just get tacked onto whatever else is already standard and the new notations almost never actually supplant the old.

AFAICT we haven't really had a big shift in fundamental mathematical notation in Europe (and its colonies) since Roman Numerals (CXXIII) gave way to Arabic (123) numerals four hundred years ago. 8I

[duskwuff]

> AFAICT we haven't really had a big shift in fundamental mathematical notation in Europe (and its colonies) since Roman Numerals (CXXIII) gave way to Arabic (123) numerals four hundred years ago. 8I

Your history is a little confused. Arabic numerals came into use in Europe as early as the 13th century (introduced by Leonardo Fibonacci), but most other mathematical notation like "=" or or "√" didn't show up until the 16th or 17th century.

[touisteur]

I think Bourbaki did brought forth a shift (clean-up) in mathematical notation and writing, at least in France.

[wat10000]

Imagine if it Turned Out that Capitalizing Various Words made Things more Readable. How Quickly Would That be Adopted?

[datsci_est_2015]

Do you speak German? A language famous for capitalizing its nouns of course.

[KellyCriterion]

++1

[jjtheblunt]

i've had lots of Latin, know what you mean, but then thought of the Pantheon, where the word breaks (acronyms included) are indicated (with interstitial dots).

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pantheon_Rom_1_cropp...

[KellyCriterion]

Wondering: If we would still write continua style, would LLM be even possible at all?

[mistrial9]

yeah - under certain "the winners write the history" framework, I believe that scribes did not add spaces between "words".. However, the world is a big place; history is long.