Or maybe the Romans? I’ll bet it was the Romans. They probably had a special room just for the purpose, the indentorium.
So why do we indent paragraphs? Why do we have paragraphs? I’ll grant you it looks good, probably because I’m used to the way it looks. I’ll grant you it’s easy to find your place on the page — but there are other ways to do that. I can imagine there’s probably a connection to the illustrated manuscripts with the elaborately floral drop caps.
What I’m looking for is which of the usual daft buggers in world history made us start indenting in the first place.
Could’ve been the Egyptians. “Indent thou by the space of Two Monkeys and one Sheaf of Grain before thou begin, lest ye visit the land with boils.”
I’d rephrase the question - Who do we credit? Fact is that most punctuation and orthographic conventions are there for the reader’s benefit. Imagine trying to read a newspaper article or a scholarly paper without the attendant paragraphing. It would be very difficult. When you learned to write longer pieces, you were advised to separate different concepts and ideas by paragraphing them. It’s helpful to you as a writer to organize your ideas and it’s most helpful to the reader.
They’re probably not the first innovators (or offenders, I suppose going by the spirit of the OP), but those monks back in the Dark Ages had a penchant for making the first letter of each book (if not each chapter) extra large, with lots of detailed artwork.
Printsetting most likely had something to do with the popularization of margins, too.
I’ll bet indentation goes almost as far back as writing itself.
I don’t know if this helps, but here is a photo of two pages of a Gutenberg bible. It looks to me as if the first two lines of each paragraph (set in moveable type) were indented, and after the page was printed, someone went in and hand-illuminated the first letter of the paragraph in decorative type. Perhaps this has something to do with the origin.
I’d guess Julius Caesar was among the first. In his day, letters/writings were all jammed together, with hardly even any markings to indicate a new sentence, let alone a paragraph. Few, even amoung the most educated- could simply pick up a letter and just read it. Most had to work through it once or twice. Julius was noted for his rare ability to “just pick up a letter and read it”- thus other than professional scribes and Julius C. we’d consider most of the ancient world to be “functionally illiterate”. :eek:
Caesar was castigated by quite a few of his contempories of 'writing like/for schoolchildren" as his Commentaries (“All Gaul is divided into three parts”) were so easy to read.
Thus, I’d guess we have to “blame” (or credit) him to start. Trust me, it’s better this way.
Who do we blame for indending paragraphs? The Greeks?
Don’t blame the Greeks. Greek like many other languages did NOT have paragraphs NOR punctuation either! ** Literacy Primmer ** will provide a partial answer.
All these devices–spacing between words, punctuation, yes and indentation, are to make reading faster. One alternative to indentation is spacing between paragraphs. You should have one or the other and indentation is less wasteful on average.
If you have not learned to read upside down, you can get some idea of the difference between reading and deciphering text by reading something upside down. I can do it, much more slowly and I have a lot of trouble with p’s and q’s and with b’s and d’s, just like dyslexics.
I understand that it is only for the last 2 or 3 centuries that people learned to read without moving their lips and some never do.
Let’s go a step further. Latin during Ceasar’s time was typically written without even having spaces between words. In fact, the verb that means “to read” in Latin (legere) also has the connotation of selecting or picking out, because the reader had to pick out the words from the confusing jumble of letters.
The Dionysian cults that flourished in Rome (in between official crackdowns) had a practice that took advantage of this standard of illegibility. A carefully selected text was given to a child to read. This text would have all kinds of ambiguous double meanings that hinged on where the reader decided to separate the individual words. One of a thousand inventive ways to divine the will of the gods. A fresco preserved in the “Villa of the Mysteries” is probably an illustration of this practice.
I think it must be long long after Rome. In fact, I’m starting to suspect that it’s after print. Looking at late MSS I’m seeing space left for large initials, but not ‘indenting’ and also no space in printed incunables (I thought I was seeing some and then realized that they were printed in Hebrew and that ‘indent’ was the end of the line. . .).
But I DO see it inthe Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, so I’m going to go out on a limb and blame it on Aldus Manutius ca 1500 (on whom we can also blame Greek and Hebrew fonts). Let me look into it a bit more.
A vertical space would be wasteful, yes. Five horizontal letter-spaces between the last letter of a paragraph and the start of a new one would be sufficient and less wasteful. The eye could easily pick out the blank spaces in the copy.
As I said in the OP, I’m not interested in reasons justifying why we indent the way we do, because I suspected the answers would be along the lines of “it looks right because that’s how we’ve always done it.”
Ok, I’ve been having a look-- I see no indenting in manuscripts, except for a time in hiberno-saxon Mss from Canterbury area like the Codex Amiatinus and Echternach Gospels and things of that ilk in which they indented every other line. Other than that I see virtually no indenting in books-- manuscript or print-- before 1500, but a handful of examples between 1500 and 1550. A few in Venice and a few in Germany. So that’s about when, and where might be harder to pin down (I still put money on Venice). I also see a number of early print examples where it looks like it’s indented but, rather, in fact a space has been left for an initial to be painted in by hand. But true indentation is showing up around then.
