Care Luce, did not the monks of the Mediaeval period read silently? Mind you that many religious orders had strict rules for keeping silence many hours a day.
When it comes to silent reading, did you ever come across anything for which the evidence was clearcut? Theses have more a ring of truth about them when they are heavily qualified.
I like this recent article by William A Johnson, “Towards a Sociology of Reading in Classical Antiquity”, The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 121, No. 4 (2000), pp.593-627. He reviews the evidence from Norden in 1898, highlighting the Augustine passage about silent reading being unusual, Balogh (1927), Knox in 1968, to Saenger and Gavrilov in 1997. The tack of his article is to question a most recent assertion that the ancient approach to reading is the same as our approach today. [He doesn’t actually talk about reader-response theory or theories, but I think that approach is relevant to his position]. Research consensus has moved from the position of Norden (that no one could read silently in the ancient period) to the later position (that sure they could and here’s the evidence that they did in the ancient world) but Johnson thinks Saenger and Gavrilov, say, are leaving out some significant differences in approaches to reading as it was in the ancient world and as it is today. You have to take into account different groups, different contexts, different purposes, different types of text (performance-related and otherwise).
Would someone who was sighted but unable to speak not be able to read in antiquity? You can’t characterise the past with one behaviour. Of course there was silent reading at all times (for the classical evidence, see articles quoted in Johnson above, or M. F. Burnyeat, “Postscript on Silent Reading”, Classical Quarterly, Vol. 47 (1997), pp.74-76), but the degree to which it was pursued, or reading aloud was pursued, by different groups in different settings to different ends can be interesting and revealing to study, and not least for what it says about our behaviours today.
Adrianus.
I suppose any form of reading (whether we are just taking up the sense silently or declaiming it out loud) is a kind of ‘undercover operation’, that is to say, the brain swabs up chunks of information from the written page and organizes them according to pre-established templates at some lower layer of consciousness. One particular aspect of this ‘chunking’ process intrigues me in the present context. We frequently hear that the brain is not intererested in the sequence of letters within individual words. Using its own lightning-swift algorithm, the brain recognizes and recreates the correct word so long as there is enough context and the ‘word-frame’ is right - that is, the first and last letters are in the correct position. My question is: This applies to English, but can it apply to inflected languages like Latin as well?
Vdeis ut atla sett nvie cdunidam …
All very well if you already know your Horace. But what about something simple but ‘unknown’:
Motlus aonns tnynaro cleduri sierves et praeibs.
But perhaps with inflected languages we should allow inflections to be part of the frame:
Mltuos annos tnanyro celrudi sveires et pearbis.
O you who are already able to read Latin with ease, do you immediately see what it says? Or do even you need an extra clue? E.g. someone is telling Hercules he’ll serve and obey a nasty ruler for a period of time. Did the case and tense endings help?
In any case, how would Poor Brain deal with a very long text without spaces or punctuation? Obviously first and last letters would be of little use in such a case. Perhaps the brain can spot the chunks even without the help of the spaces that WE have come to rely on. Perhaps it’s just a matter of that versatile organ honing a particular skill, like reading from right to left or vertically, or reading musical notation or doing algebra. Know of any useful literature on the subject?
Cantator: It was interesting to hear about your daughter. As a young schoolboy, I stuttered whenever I was asked to read aloud in class. Then I got interested in poetry and spouted Bitter Wind, Lycidas, Nightingale, West Wind, Rubaiyat, etc, ALOUD '‘down the fields’ (luckily for me and others, I lived in the country). One result was that my stutter vanished. 
Cheers,
Int
Interaxe,
I’m not one of those who can read Latin with ease, so with or without spaces, things are a struggle.
A section in the Johnson (2000) article referenced above may be interesting to you, “A Cognitive Model for Ancient Reading” (pp.610-612). He suggests that, (1) because column widths in ancient literary rolls were typically 15-25 characters wide and (2) lines typically began at a meaningful syllable division, and (3) because this coincides with the capacity of our parafoveal vision, within which the eye can check around the reading point to contextualize things, --all these factors provided very good points of reference to help the reader decode column-line-by-column-line and not in very long strings.
Sounds insightful.
Unfortunately, when I look at the Jean Mallon printed facsimile collection of early Latin manuscripts in the Paris Archives Nationales (referenced above), there are certainly some examples of MSS with very long unbroken text strings in very wide lines. No easy answers here either, but Johnson could be a bit right.
Adrianus
That was fun, but I didn’t do as well as I would have liked, celrudi and pearbis threw me off. 
Cantator: It was interesting to hear about your daughter. As a young schoolboy, I stuttered whenever I was asked to read aloud in class. Then I got interested in poetry and spouted Bitter Wind, Lycidas, Nightingale, West Wind, Rubaiyat, etc, ALOUD '‘down the fields’ (luckily for me and others, I lived in the country). One result was that my stutter vanished.
The country singer Mel Tillis was known as Stuttering Mel, and the blues singer John Hammond Jr also stutters when speaking. A friend here in town stutters when he talks, but he sings perfectly. Singing and recitation are closely related, i.e. they share the aspect of measured rhythm, an organizing agent for the performer. By comparison, normal casual speech is improvised, possibly lending a confusion factor to Poor Brain. 
But singing isn’t speaking. Perhaps the sheer amount of time you practiced resulted in a permanent effect ?
Ithoughtthismightbeofinterest.Ipostedarecordingonmywebsiteof
BruceandVictoria,theMaccomputervoices,
readingCatulluswithnoworddivisions,accentsorpunctuation,
andthenwithworddivisions,punctuationandvowellengths(butnosentencestresses).
Brucehasbeentoldtopronounceinecclesiasticalstyle,Victoriatopronounce’classically’,–inmyfashion.
Ididchangetheconsonantal-utovthesecondtimearound,also.
TheURLishttp://www.adrianmallonmultimedia.com/latin/adrianus_bruce_victoria.mov.
Whatdoyouthink?Ithoughtthat,sincethecomputercouldn’t
imposeunderstanding,howwelldowedecodeaurallywhenwelistentoit
(leavingasidethemodel’sinherentlimitations),
apartfromvisuallywhenwereadfromthepage?
(Pleaseforgetaboutelision.IknowIcertainlyhavefornow.
NordoIthinkanyonewouldberecitingapoemasreadforthefirsttime.
Onewouldrecitefrommemory.)
Here’sthepoemasread(mysoftwarereadscircumflexesasmacrons–
justeasierforthewayIstoredatainanexternaldatabase–
butdoessuperimposethemacronsinanembeddedfont
whichyouwon’thaveonyourmachines):
lugeteovenerescupidinesque
etquantumesthominumuenustiorum
passermortuusestmeaepuellae
passerdeliciaemeaepuellae
quemplusillaoculissuisamabat
nammellituseratsuamquenorat
ipsamtambenequampuellamatrem
necseseagremioilliusmouebat
sedcircumsiliensmodohucmodoilluc
adsolamdominamusquepipiabat
quinuncitperitertenebricosum
illudundenegantredirequemquam
atuobismalesitmalaetenebrae
orciquaeomniabelladeuoratis
tambellummihipasseremabstulistis
ofactummaleomisellepasser
tuanuncoperameaepuellae
flendoturgidulirubentocelli
lûgête, ô venerês cupîdinêsque,
et quantum est hominum venustiôrum.
passer mortuus est meae puellae,
passer dêliciae meae puellae,
quem plûs illâ oculîs suîs amâbat.
nam mellîtus erat suamque nôrat,
ipsam tam bene quam puella mâtrem,
nec sêsê â gremiô illîus movebat.
sed circum siliens, modô hûc modô illûc,
ad sôlam dominam usque pîpiâbat.
quî nunc it per iter tenebricôsum,
illud unde negant redîre quemquam.
at vobîs male sit, malae tenebrae
orcî, quae omnia bella dêvorâtis,
nam bellum mihi passerem abstulistis.
ô factum male. ô miselle passer.
tuâ nunc operâ, meae puellae
flendô turgidulî rubent ocellî.
Adrianus
(gettingyourheadaroundawordspacemighthavebeenasunnecessaryasgettingyourheadaroundazeroforaRoman)
Adriane: Thanks for confirming my strong suspicions - spaces are not a sine qua non for human brains. In fact, even I can read your Latin ‘lines’ with comparative ease. That’s partly because I’m familiar with the text - so obviously anyone with good vocabulary and sound grammar would be unfazed by a dearth of spaces. (Sorry to say, I’ve yet to hear your recordings. Perhaps your link will work when I get back to town and broadband).
Your spaceless English was a cinch. Just to underline your point, here’s a bit of Goold’s Loeb translation de-spaced:
mournyegracesand loves
andallyouwhomthegraceseslove
myladyssparrowisdead
thesparrowmyladyspet
whomshelovedmorethanherveryeyes
forhoneysweethewasandknewhismistress
aswellasagirlknowsherownmother
Please excuse a reflection in the opposite direction. I have always felt that one reason Latin is more difficult than modern European languages for most of us is the fact that the words between the spaces tend to be long and prepositions few and far between. Thus, Latin is a low scorer in the (European) readability index contest! Our modern reading algorithms are based very much on words and spaces. The question is, how much should this factor be taken into account when designing beginner Latin courses?
It is interesting to compare languages like Arabic, the written form of which uses only consonants, relying on the reader to supply the necessary vowels (except for some long vowels). Something in the style of:
Ystrdy I flw t new yrk nd spk t my shrnk. I ddnt lk wht sh sd.
“O, the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall
Frightful …” (Gerard Manley Hopkins) 
Cheers,
Int
Thanks, Interaxe. Please advise if you still can’t get the sound file. It’s packaged as a QuickTime file, so you may need the QT plugin to play it in your browser.
I have a Polish friend who found Latin much easier than English at school because, like Polish, it’s inflected. It was all those fiddly English prepositions that drove her nuts, and they still drive her nuts today, even though she has lived and worked in England for twenty years.
Adrianus
Indeed, once the basics of Latin are mastered, it becomes intuitive — the same cannot be said of English with all its prepositional verbs.
Unfortunately, when it come to parsing words using computer techniques, it is much slower to do it in Latin than in English, and that’s because of the junction between stem and inflection. The computer can’t discriminate (apart from in a few crude ways that aren’t foolproof) or be intuitive, and has to run through a lot more letter permutations as a result. The human eye, though, can discern where the division is, so it’s as you say for a human, Luce, or at least, I imagine so, because I’m nowhere near your fluency level.
When it comes to the acute, grave, and circumflex in French, it is said that these symbols were introduced as part of a movement for spelling reform in the sixteenth century. I don’t know who is aware of it, but those introducing the symbols in the French language were applying them exactly according to the Latin (and Greek) grammarians’ rules. Robert Estienne in his 1530 edition of Corderius’s De Corrupti sermonis emendatione, writes (consistently for the first time) trompé, corrigé, abbé, a s s é s, venés ; or the grave accent as à , là , où or Sylvius (published by Robert Estienne in 1531) applies the circumflex in French to âge, saûl.
If you look at the Wikipedia article, “Use of the circumflex in French” –http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_the_circumflex_in_French and based on http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accent_circonflexe_en_français, last viewed 15 Oct 2006–, it says “Sylvius was quite aware that the circumflex was purely a graphical convention.” If you look back at this thread, you’ll see I’m saying something very different. And now I’m saying the French language gets its accenting directly from the Latin grammarians’ (Greek) model, and that, initially, the French accenting faithfully denoted pitch-profiling on a stressed syllable. It’s only later (sometimes much later–1740s) that the accents migrate to other parts of the word to give us the modern accents of French today.
Adrianus
(I don’t know if I should apologize for bringing us into French, but it’s necessary for the argument to hold up in French to support its reality in Latin.)
Thanks a fantastic observation, Adriane! Thank you for offering that awesome revelation.
Thanks, Luce. That’s really kind of you. Of course, you might be teasing, and I might be just silly. But I think that neither of those last things are true. More importantly, I think that, were the accenting idea to be true (and I think it is and I think I can prove it,–eventually, as I always say), then accenting and scientific nomenclature could be the last great gifts of the Roman grammarians to european languages. That would be worth raising a few acutes to, and downing some graves, to get that circumflex feeling (while staring at the cedilla in the bottom).
Adrianus.
I am quite serious, and your access to these old books — learning English through Latin, the rules of French accents, among others — is giving us a remarkable view at things we were mostly ignorant of before. I appreciate the Renascence a great deal more through these studies alone.
That’s funny. I, a native Spanish-speaker, am going nuts translating a document from English to Spanish precisely because of the lack of prepositions. It’s a problem in that, if you are not very careful in the conversion, you could end up doing the opposite, i.e., abusing the prepositions. Exempla gratia: “Transistor pulse width modulation control method” (no preps here) turned into “método de control de modulación de anchura de pulso del transistor”. After some serious head-banging I managed to correct that to something more pleasant, but longer. sigh
Vale!
Hi, Amadee (is that the vocative?).
That’s a nice complementary point: drowning in prepositions, and can’t find one when you need one!
If “Transistor-pulse-width-modulation control-method” is a preferable English phrasing, can you similarly hyphenate in a few strategic spots in Spanish? Obviously not. I think French is a bit similar: there’s a reluctance to do the lazy English thing with this type of phrase-label. Why is that, Amadee? And if you translated that phrase into Latin, would the inflections be as begrudged for their repetition as your Spanish prepositions?
P.S. Thanks again, Luce.
Regarding the Latin translation of that wonderful technical phrase:
Tr?nstit?riī pulsūs l?titūdinis modul?ti?nis methodus agitandī.
Makes more sense in Latin.
One thing to keep in mind here is that English orthography is somewhat far removed from the actual linguistics of what a “word” is (there is an interesting book edited by R. M. W. Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald on the topic of what a “word” really is). For this reason, the orthography’s spaces pre-parse (to some extent) the language.
For example (this is obviously flawed, but gives the idea), instead of thinking of puellae as genitive singular, think of it as the word “puell” followed by the postposition “ae”, roughly equivalent to the English preposition “of”. Keep in mind I’m not trying to argue that the case system is actually system of postpositions. A computer should have no more trouble with this than it would with “of the girl”.
On the other hand, English in some ways makes things more difficult, by separating the modifiers and prepositions so that it is not always clear (to a computer) what goes with what.
Hi, Silene,
I’ll try to find the Dixon-Aikenvald book because that sounds intriguing.
And what you say about parsing could be right, but the identification of the ‘ae’ bit is the problem, plus the disambiguation.
With “puellae, of the girl” I deconstruct ‘of’ = OK > ‘o+f’ = NOT OK, ‘the’ = OK > ‘th+e’ = NOT OK, ‘girl’ = OK > gir+l = NOT OK (not a plural or verb ending or gerund, etc), plus the routines to check the word order and then start to try to disambiguate (none in this case);
‘puellae’ gives me four cases,–genitive sing., dative sing., nominative pl., and vocative plural,–and, to arrive at that, I need to deconstruct from the rear: puellae = NOT OK (i.e., not a look-up entry) > puella+e = NOT OK > puell+ae = OK > puel+lae = NOT OK), plus the routines to begin the disambiguation (big problem).
Maybe there are better ways.
I just know that, in answering some questions such as “what’s the longest word you can create from these letters…” (and a series of letters say), there are many more possibilities in Latin (due to variety in inflections) than in English, so my routine to come up with the answer is pretty slow in Latin, and fast in English. In Latin, the permutations one must check against become vast very quickly as the letters increase. Actually, that problem might have relevance for what Interaxus mentioned earlier about the brain’s ability to unscramble nested letters. An inflected language has to be more difficult to unscramble.
Adrianus
P.S. “Tr?nstit?riī pulsūs l?titūdinis modul?ti?nis methodus agitandī.”
You’re right, Luce, --more sensible, and lovely. Manufacturers would shift more units with Latin packaging!!
I see what you’re saying with deconstructing from the back, but that was the very point I was trying to make about spacing. What if in English, pronouns and prepositions were “shoved” onto the words? Forexample, Iwouldwrite like this. If it were spaced, “puell” would be a word, and “ae” would be no different than an “of” in front of “girl”. Also, when dealing with “of”, does it mean possession, or is it an objective genitive, or subjective, or more of a quality thing? And “of” is one of the less ambiguous English words. Try giving “as” a singular meaning. Just because a word is separate doesn’t mean it has one meaning. For one implementation (ie. the one you describe), Latin may be harder, but I think one could write just as natural a program that would have no trouble with “Latin-with-spaces”, as I described earlier. Keep in mind this is just a theoretical discussion. Obviously in practice, Latin may present more difficulty than English, and as you have a lot more experience in this field than I do, I trust that you are right.
Interestingly, I find that Latin’s inflections make it easier for me to read texts WRITTENLIKETHIS. I can usually tell where a word starts or ends even if I don’t know it. Though I can do this in English, I’m not so sure how good I would be at it if I weren’t a native speaker (a lot relies, I think, on phonotactics). On the other hand, my knowledge of Latin doesn’t come close to that of a native speaker.
Also, languages without consonants aren’t so bad to read (I know enough Hebrew to know this). Basically, one just learns to sight-recognize words without the vowels, and then the vowels flow naturally, just like pronouncing English vowels despite how removed the sound is from the spelling.