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The anecdote about Caesar strikes a chord here, Jon. As far as I understand, silent reading in the West did not become prevalent among the minority of the population who could read until the practice of separating words in manuscripts became common, along with the development of punctuation, and it seems this was associated with the advent of the scriptoria, and took place during the 'Dark Ages'. Remember, Greek and Roman scrolls were so 'user-unfriendly' that they were written, usually, entirely in capitals too. But they were simultaneously products of a literate culture, one where the 'sound qualities' of verse had the kind of sophistication that one associates later with say Western chamber music, rather than the neo-primitive chants of contemporary oral poetry. My curiosity about China hovers around what I understand about the nature of Classical Chinese poetry. As neville rightly observed, literacy in Imperial China was limited, as it was in the West until comparitively recently, but Chinese script, being non-alphabetic, had the peculiar function of intelligibilty across mutually incomprehensible dialects. The sound qualities of the poetry too, as I understand, were quite undeveloped, employing simple syllabic stuctures and helplessly rhyming, one writer I recall characterized the poetry as all sounding to Western ears as if going to the tune of 'pop goes the weasel' (!), yet by about the 8th century AD the T'ang poets had developed a polysemic poetry of simultaneous multiple meaning that could equal say Mallarme or other 'advanced' poets of recent times in its many-layeredness of suggestion. It has to be said that the literary language became a serious problem, as its ambiguity made for real problems in transactional communication. Radical reform of the script had been debated since the nineteenth century, and, indeed, there had been reforms in the past, as far back as the First Chin Emperor, the Burner of the Books. david bircumshaw ----- Original Message ----- From: Jon Corelis <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Saturday, January 27, 2001 5:51 PM Subject: Re: Silent reading > I donŐt know about China, but I remember reading somewhere that the first > person in the Western world who read silently was Julius Caesar, who was > observed reading a letter that way. It was taken as a mark of his genius. > > > ===== > > If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a > tree it had better not come at all. > > -- Keats > > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com