Hi Stephen,
Thanks for pointing out that paper types of medium were relatively easy to
come by and not expensive in ancient times. The problem that Gunnar pointed
out of words running together because of lack of spacing between words seems
rather odd then, although your guess that they were simply trying to reflect
how spoken dialogue had no pauses between words seems reasonable. Perhps
reading was just not a very popular activity so they could tolerate reader
unfriendly script without using common sense to develop more legible
scripting standards.This would only seem to be a problem with written
languages that use alphabets. In Chinese, words are clearly distinct since
each word is a symbol.
.
My wish is that we could devise a Romanized pali script that was not
dependent on the special characters not accessible from a standard querty
keyboard without installing new fonts and using weird control sequences to
input special characters. My reason for this is when people do searches on
google or other web search tools, if there are different ways to search for
"metta", "mettaa" for example, it just makes things scattered and the
knowledge database non-consolidated and hard to do thorough searches. Just
like when I do a search for astanga yoga on the web, I have to search both
ashtanga and astanga. Very annoying.
Since the querty keyboard is not going away soon, and seems to be the
standard for this digital age, I wish we could transcribe the pali canon in
a simpler friendlier format that anyone can easily do specialized pali
searches on the web and expect complete finds.

-fk



-----Original Message-----
From: Pali@yahoogroups.com [mailto:Pali@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of
Stephen Hodge
Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2005 1:12 PM
To: Pali@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Pali] exclamation point in pali suttas

Dear Frank,

You wrote:
Your explanations make sense. I'd guess the reason ancient text had no
spaces was because the real estate (paper medium) was prohibitively
expensive so they wanted to cram as much into as little space without regard
for legibility.
*****
This may seem plausible but I feel that it is not an adequate explanation.
You talk about paper, but you should realize that the use of paper began
quite late in India -- they used patra (palm leaves) or birch bark --
neither of which would have been expensive. If we look further afield, we
see that all ancient scripts were written without word breaks long before
paper was invented. The Mesopotamian civilizations used clay tablets
(anything cheaper ?), the Egyptians used papyrus sheets (also very cheap),
and the Chinese originally used bamboo slates (again very cheap).

Hence, the real reason for the absence of words breaks would seem to have
nothing to do with the cost of paper. I would suggest the actual reason is
much simpler and should be obvious: when we speak, there are no or few
spaces between words. It is more likely then that early writing imitated
the continuous flow of words. Ancient punctuation, such as it was, merely
indicated where one paused for breath !

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge





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