Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • Imagine how creepy a reader must seem to a ancient uneducated analphabet.

    Guy looks down at artifact, eyes flicker, pages flipped- then looks up: "Now i know.."

    by 21asdffdsa12
  • Makes sense, with oral traditions being so strong back then. Debugging a codebase by vocalizing variables sounds wild.
    by lampcord
  • There's been a lot of debate over the years about what exactly it was that Ambrose was doing differently, and whether silent reading was really so uncommon in antiquity.
    by xhevahir
  • I have no idea, but with ADHD and all, I have taken recently the habit of reading aloud, especially course texts, doc’s and other boring stuff I easily get distracted with. I pretend to be a BBC 4 broadcaster. It seems to work. After awhile you can stop and just read silently.
    by delis-thumbs-7e
  • It’s worth recalling that mass literacy is only about 300 years old, so the modern culture of private reading is only slightly older than the United States, which is probably itself a consequence of mass literacy - sparked by Luther, Gutenberg, etc. Ironically, today the USA is also probably leading the decline in mass literacy woth a “post-literate president.” Maybe book-reading will eventually become an anachronistic hobby, although even Thomas Jefferson made this dire prophecy too about fiction [1].

    “Acoustic representations activated in silent reading are best characterized as inner speech rather than as abstract phonological codes.” [2]

    1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-...

    2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03205520

    by itchingsphynx
  • Reading was very different in the old times, todays text is clear and filled with many aides that didnt exist back then.

    For starters text didnt include spaces which im going to guess would have meant people tried to "sound" out sequences of letters and slowly found words and consumed the text. From what ive seen many times it was difficult to tell letters apart due to ink runs or simply because the ink was too think. Just imagine if its hard for us to tell capital eye and little el, it must have been impossible manytimes back then.

    by MiroslavPokorny
  • Augustine describes silent reading himself:

    “I returned in haste to the place where Alipius was sitting, for I had left the book of the Apostle there when I stood up. I seized it, opened it, and read in silence the chapter upon which my eyes first fell”

    https://sourcelibrary.org/book/meditationes-divi-augustini-e...

    by dr_dshiv

Explore Birbla archives