Imagine you're about to give an important speech.
You step up to the podium, clear your throat, take a look at the teleprompter and see this?
Not only are there no spaces between words, but the text is written in the Bustrophedon style, ancient Greek for as the ox turns, where the direction alternates between left to right and right to left with every line.
You might be able to stumble your way through, but you certainly won't win any awards for public speaking.
Now when we are lamenting the dead, attribute should be paid to... uh...
Believe it or not, this is how ancient Greeks wrote their texts, which is why, if an orator was going to recite a speech, they would likely rehearse it several times in advance, perhaps making little marks to remind them when to pause or take a breath.
Those little marks could arguably be said to be the first ancestors of our modern-day punctuation.
But it would take a lot of historical events and innovations to get from this to this.
I'm Dr. Erika Brozovsky, and this is Otherwords.
Around 200 BC, the head librarian of the Great Library of Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium, tried to come up with standardized markings for denoting when a speaker should pause while reading a text, known as distincciones.
