SCIENCE IN THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD 



sentence in his own language written on a typewri- 

 ter with the omission of spaces between the words. 

 Hereisaprintedsampleinil lustration. The reader who 

 stumbles a little over this sentence will be given a 

 realizing sense of the difficulties that confronted a 

 school-child of, for example, the Greek classical period. 



It goes without saying that the shift from the un- 

 spaced, unpunctuated, unparagraphed sentence, to the 

 modern method, was not made in a day or a generation. 

 The study of a long series of manuscripts affords inter- 

 esting illustrations of the slow invention of these con- 

 veniences and the unreadiness with which a conserv- 

 ative world adopted them. The old Persians were the 

 only Orientals of antiquity who saw the desirability of 

 indicating word divisions. Curiously enough, as it 

 seems to us, they did not hit upon the plan of merely 

 leaving a wider space at the end of words, but adopted, 

 instead, the more laborious and less graphic method of 

 placing an oblique line at a particular angle at the end 

 of each word, a line or, more accurately, a wedge- 

 shaped mark differing in no respect, except in its angle 

 of placement, from other marks that are variously 

 grouped to make the characters of their writing. 



It will be recalled that the Persians divide with the 

 Phcenicians the honor of the invention of an alphabetical 

 writing. In the light of this fact, it is interesting to 

 recall that one of the oldest pieces of writing in the 

 Phoenician alphabetical script, namely, the inscription 

 of the Moabite Stone, shows a tendency to mark with 

 dots the divisions between words. It appears, from this, 

 that the idea of the separation of words had occurred to 



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