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, I'm only going to be focusing on languages that use

alphabets, not logographic 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 who refused to read out loud a

manuscript that he had never read before because he said he would

mangle the meaning so he gave the document to a bystander who could read and the

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