Reading aloud was normal for almost all of history

In Milan, around the year 384, a man of thirty walked into someone else’s room and found him reading. There would be nothing to tell, except for one detail he thought worth writing down: the man reading was not moving his lips.

The one watching is Augustine, not yet a saint. The one reading is Ambrose, bishop of Milan. The scene ended up in the Confessions (VI, 3) because it struck Augustine enough that he tried to explain it: when Ambrose read, he says, his eyes ran over the pages and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and his tongue were at rest.

Notice what that implies. The thing that needed explaining was not the reading. It was the silence.

A warning before we go on

That passage has been used for a century to support a very strong claim: that people in antiquity could not read silently. Josef Balogh argued it forcefully in the 1920s and it was repeated in textbooks for decades.

It should be said that the extreme version is no longer tenable. In 1968 Bernard Knox gathered the ancient instances of silent reading — messages read privately, tablets, scenes in drama — and showed that Greeks and Romans read without sound whenever it suited them. Augustine himself, a few lines later, offers prosaic explanations: perhaps Ambrose was sparing his voice, or did not want to be asked about what he was reading.

So the honest thesis is not “they could not”, but something more interesting: reading aloud was the default, the practice that shaped books, buildings and social life, and silent reading was the special case. That is what the rest of this article is about.

Texts were built to be sounded

An ancient scroll looks nothing like this page. No spaces between words, no punctuation, no capitals to open a sentence, no paragraphs, no index. It is called scriptio continua: an unbroken ribbon of letters.

Deciphering that with your eyes is slow, deliberate work; saying it aloud is, oddly, easier, because the ear recognises words as soon as they sound. The voice was part of the method, not an ornament. Reading was, literally, giving sound to a row of signs until the sound turned into sense.

Systematic word separation arrived much later, in early medieval manuscripts — Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes had a great deal to do with it — and that is one of the stories best told by Paul Saenger in Space Between Words: without spaces, silent reading is uncomfortable; with spaces, it becomes fluent. The page kept changing shape until it no longer needed a voice.

The same thing shows up in any library: modern punctuation began largely as notation for breathing. The marks we now read as logic — where the subordinate clause ends — started out marking where to stop for air. A punctuated text is a text with instructions for reading aloud.

A building that speaks in the first person

My favourite example is not in a book. It is on a wall.

The halls of the Alhambra are written. Not merely decorated: written, with poems running along dados, arches and fountains. Many are by Ibn Zamrak, poet and vizier to Muhammad V in the second half of the fourteenth century; Emilio García Gómez translated them into Spanish in Poemas árabes en los muros y fuentes de la Alhambra.

The striking thing is the grammatical person. The inscriptions say “I”. I am the garden. I am the crown of the palace. The fountain speaks about itself and about the man who commissioned it. The building introduces itself.

And now the question with no way out on the writing side: almost nobody who entered those halls could read that. Not the townspeople, not much of the court, not the foreign ambassadors. So who is a poem on a wall written for, if hardly anyone can read it?

To be spoken. Those poems were recited at ceremonies. The wall was the script; the voice was the reading. The building spoke because someone read it aloud to those who could not read it themselves. A text can be written and still exist mainly as sound.

Reading was something done in company

For centuries, reading was a group activity, and not out of romanticism: out of arithmetic. Books were expensive and readers were few. One reader could serve thirty listeners.

• In monasteries, the Rule of St Benedict prescribes reading aloud during meals, with a weekly reader. A refectory is a room built to listen to a book.
• In Don Quixote (I, 32) the innkeeper explains that at harvest time the reapers gather at his inn, and whoever can read picks up a book of chivalry while thirty or more crowd round to hear it. Cervantes is describing an ordinary custom of his time, not an eccentricity.
• In workshops the habit lasted very late. The best-known case is the Cuban lector de tabaquería: from 1865, in cigar factories, a reader paid by the workers themselves read the newspaper in the morning and novels in the afternoon, from a platform, while everyone else rolled. The custom travelled with emigrants to Tampa and Key West, and it still exists.
• In nineteenth-century homes, reading aloud after dinner was the equivalent of switching on the television. Serialised novels were written with that in mind: chapter endings are designed so that someone can look up and say “more tomorrow”.

Behind all this is an idea we have lost: a book was not necessarily a private object. It was a source several people drank from at once.

What silence won and what it cost

Silent reading is not an impoverishment, and it would be silly to say so. It brought enormous things: speed — you read silently far faster than anyone speaks — privacy, the ability to re-read a line without anyone noticing, critical reading, and that intensely private relationship with a text that now seems the only possible one. A library full of people silently reading different things is a magnificent invention.

But two things were lost.

The first is the body. A spoken text has breath, tempo and audible mistakes. Writers know it: the final test of a sentence is saying it out loud. If it cannot be said, it does not hold, however good it looks on screen.

The second is company. Reading silently, each of us to ourselves, seems normal because we were born inside the habit. From a distance it is a historical oddity barely two centuries old.

And now

What I do with all this is modest and does not claim to be a thesis. I have made an app that gives written text its voice back: any text, on a phone, offline, without the text leaving the device. Inside it, the most philological part is not the voice but the reading script: deciding that “the XX century” is “the twentieth century” and “Henry VIII” is “Henry the Eighth”. Which is exactly what the cigar factory reader did when the newspaper carried a figure.

I do not know whether this helps people read more, or whether it is precisely what we do not need. Maybe what we need is the opposite: to sit down, hold the page and train our attention. I think about it often.

What I do know is that the voice is not a degraded substitute for reading. It was the normal way of reading for almost the whole history of writing. Seen from far enough away, silence is the strange part.

If you want to try it on something worth the time, there are complete public domain stories on this site, ready to be read to you. And if you would rather start with your own things, this is how you share a text with the app.