The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily.

There once was a time when languages had no punctuation.

Not only did they not have punctuation, but they also didn't even have spaces between

words and in some cases they didn't even use vowels. It was extremely confusing if you were

trying to read something, so eventually people began inserting marks and characters into text to make it easier to read.

Learn more about punctuation marks, and how and why they were developed on this episode of

Everything Everywhere Daily. Language developed as a tool for oral communication.

Humans were speaking with each other long before anyone developed a system to record words.

When written language was developed, it was only known by very few people and usually just to record basic information.

For the purposes of this episode episode I'm only going to be

focusing on languages that use alphabets, not logo graphic systems like Chinese

which are a totally different thing. And eventually I'll just focus on English which is the language that all of you listening know.

The first writing systems were extremely basic.

Some of the first alphabetic writing systems such as Phoenician and Hebrew didn't have lower-case letters, didn't use

spaces between words, and didn't even use vowels. It is entirely possible to

read something written without spaces, lowercase letters or vowels.

However, it's very slow going, and it's very easy to confuse what is being said.

This type of writing became known as Scriptura Continua.

In the ancient world, there were, relatively speaking, few written documents.

It was expected that it would take time to read a scroll,

and it wasn't something that you would fully grasp on the first read-through.

There once was a second century Roman writer by the name of Aulis Gellius,

...