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Reading History
Reading History
Reading History
GOMEZ
BSE-FILIPINO II-I
READING
The History of Reading
Spoken language is a natural, biological form of human communication that is over 6 million years old. Reading is an invention that is only 6000 years old. There simply hasn't been enough evolutionary time, yet, for the human physiology of reading to be perfected.
Aristotle, the world's first psychologist, understood this fundamental difference and relationship between spoken language and written language.
In 2000 BC, the Phoenicians developed the first methods to represent spoken language - an alphabet consisting entirely of consonants:
SPOKENWORDS.
1000 BC--the Greeks added vowels.
About 1000 years later, in 200 BC, the next major upgrade in writing appeared: punctuation marks. Punctuation was first observed in Alexandrian manuscripts of plays written by Aristophanes.
Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience, and written words are the symbols of spoken words.
900 AD--spaces between words.
For the past 1000 years, there has been essentially no change in the formatting of text, the technology of spatially symbolizing natural spoken language, whether one considers the handwritten scripts of 900 AD, the Gutenberg Bible of 1500 AD, or the EBook of 2000 AD.
1000 AD
1500 AD
2000 AD
The great reading opportunity of electronic text is that digital content can be read by a machine. This machine readability can be used to analyze text for syntactic structure, grammatical attributes, word difficulty, pronunciation attributes, and the like, and the results of this analysis can then be used to give shape to the presentation of text, using patterns that enable the eye and the mind to work together to build meaning for the reader. The LiveInk method of attribute extraction and varied presentation of text can be automatically performed, and finally transforms Aristotle's sentence into this:
Spoken words
are the symbols of mental experience, and written words are the symbols of spoken words.
2000 AD--LiveInk