Le jeudi 30 avril 2020 à 10:03 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot a écrit :
Old human languages did not use word separators like space in
writing, because "everyone knew" where one word started and the next
finished. Even scholars that spent their life studying one of those
past civilizations find them endlessly confusing by today’s
standards.
Of course past civilizations had other constrains. It is expensive to
carve a separator on your stone tablet. Physical space on the obelisk
you carried up from another region entirely is at a premium. But, fun
fact, the Egyptians did make an exception for the ruler names (can’t
get subjects to confuse where the ruler name starts and ends), and this
exception is the sole reason we can read ancient Egyptian today
(Champollion’s breakthrough started with the nicely separated Pharao
names).
--
Nicolas Mailhot