12 centuries should be plenty of time for a simple upgrade to improve the UX of a language.

It was not much needed until computer text processing become a thing.

The UX of a language for most people for most of that time was speech.

Very true, and we should remember that in a lot of (all?) cultures across time, literacy (learning to read and write) was a marker of class, and/or a protected trade, and/or considered sacred, and/or considered profane.

In other words, there wasn’t much an incentive or recognized need to make the scribe’s job easy to pick up.

Caesar (I think) tells us that the druids of the Celts did not allow members of their tradition to write down their beliefs, traditions, etc. Writing in that context (prior to 50 BCE) was profane.

Of course, those of us in America are familiar with slaves being prevented from learning to read. Forced illiteracy in this context was a tool of oppression. [1]

I think in one of S.M. Sterling’s fictional books (On the Ocean of Eternity?? Part of the Island in the Sea of Time series, anyway) there’s a great exchange with a Babylonian scribe who laughs at the simplistic alphabet of the American, condescendingly remarking that child could learn that, to which the guy replied, yeah, that’s entirely the point!

1. https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/singleton/singleton.html

> Spaces between words is a relatively recent Irish invention (7th or 8th century) in western written language, so it’s not like it’s an obvious thing to have.

Perhaps, but interpuncts between words are several centuries older than that and occur as natural developments in e.g. the Roman Empire. https://loeb-art-center.vassarspaces.net/wp-content/gallery/...

The concept of word separation is an obvious thing to have. Whether the separator is empty space is unimportant.

Latin used dots to separate words.