Anois agus arís
Everyone in Ireland is talking about the recent finds of the ancient
manuscript book and fragments found preserved in a bog in Fadden More,
Co. Tipperary. The finds also include a leather book satchel, the second
to be found in the area, dated back to the 7th century. The fact that
the book could still be read by the experts caused me some thought.
Ever wondered, as you read this article, who invented spaces between words,
capitalised letters and used a rudimentary system of punctuation?
I am talking about the Western form of writing, of course. The Chinese
and Japanese, the Egyptians and Ethiopics developed their writing separately.
Writing, that wonderful recording of language peculiar to the human species,
began around 6000 BC and each group developed differently.
Here, in Europe, it is a fact that, before the 7th century AD, texts in
Greek and Latin were written as a continuous text, ‘scriptura continua’
as scholars called it. Some Greek texts had devised a system of drawing
horizontal lines between items that they called ‘paragraphos’
and hence these were to development into paragraphs. But there was a complete
absence of word separation, no capital letters and no punctuation as we
know it.
Well, no prizes for guessing who altered all that. Along came the Irish
scribes, beavering away in their monasteries, and started to produce texts
mostly in Latin which become known as the ‘Libri Scottice scripti’
— books written in the Irish fashion.
Lo and behold, the Irish scribes had introduced word-separation, capitalisation
and a rudimentary system of punctuation. The Continental scribes continued
on with their continuous script until the 9th century AD but, as Professor
Malcolm Parkes, the noted palaeologist, has pointed out, the Irish were
at the forefront of introducing a ‘grammar of legibility’.
He argues this in his work ‘The contribution of insular scribes
of the 7th and 8th centuries to the Grammar of Legibility’ (1991).
It is the Irish scholars, so Professor Parkes reminds us, that brought
literacy and learning to the poor benighted Anglo-Saxons at this time.
And it seems that they brought some pretty revolutionary literacy techniques.
Professor Dáibhi Ó Cróinín, when he gave the
2003 O’Donnell Lecture ‘The First Century of Anglo-Irish Relations
AD 600-700’, reminded us of Professor Parkes’ work. He points
out that the form of writing without word separation, capitals or punctuation
might not have presented difficulties to the educated Roman reader. The
practised eye would pick up graphic clues and enable the reader to distinguish
between letters and syllables and identify combinations of them in words
or phrases.
The Irish, never having been part of the Roman Empire, and learning Latin
as a completely foreign language, needed word separation to help them.
They had to identify and mark the boundaries of the Latin words and they
came up with the simple idea of leaving spaces between them.
As Professor Ó Cróinín pointed out, leaving spaces
between words meant that they would have to leave larger spaces between
sentences or find another method — sentences, clauses and phrases
had to be separated. How?
Those cunning Irish scribes came up with the idea of ‘construe-marks’,
the possibilities of developing signs and symbols to indicate the relationship
of words to one another. Full stops, commas and other strange symbols
began to enter the written language.
Rather than go down the unwieldy Greek method of drawing horizontal lines
between sections to indicate ‘paragraphos’ they simply used
a more prominent letter (which we call a capital) and combined this with
a ‘diminuendo effect’ to give more space to the text, an indent,
achieving what was then a distinctive and innovative layout to the page.
Thus the written text became easier for the non-native speaker to read
Latin.
Professor Parkes points out that the fascinating thing is that when the
Irish scribes came to write their own language, they did not feel the
need to employ these techniques because they understood their own language
as a native tongue and therefore word separation and punctuation was no
problem.
However, the literary revolution started by the Irish scribes began to
have an influence throughout Europe.
Of course, during the so-called Dark Ages, students from all over Europe,
including the Anglo-Saxons, were flocking to Irish colleges and monastic
foundations to gain their education. At the great college of Durrow in
the mid-7th century, students are listed as attending from no less than
18 different countries.
The finds at Fadden More have been considered very exciting. The manuscript
book, a book of psalms, has been dated to about 1200 by the National Museum.
But the satchel found in the same bog about six years ago was dated to
the 7th century. The area around is one rich in early medieval history
with such ecclesiastical centres as Lorrha, Templeglass, Birr and Seirkieran
nearby. It is exciting to think what else will appear preserved in the
bogs of Ireland? |
