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jeandanjou t1_je4xjhs wrote

Reply to comment by Kaiisim in TIL the majority of ancient Greeks and Romans that were literate read out loud. Reasons for this include a lack of space between letters and no formalized system of punctuation that helped with pauses in reading. by Ask_Me_If_Im_A_Horse

Languages study in general. People never stop to think about language families.

For example, why it took millennia for people to realize how closely related were Greek, Celt, Latin, Sanskrit, Scythian, Persian and German (all are Indo-European) despite more or less intense exchange between people using them?

Because we didn't have grammar rules or standards, so patterns were insanely hard to distinguish and could vary from location or speaker.

So instead they had a feeling that things were similar, which ended up with a lot of them assuming things an universal kind of base for everything.

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