More recently Enoch Powell M. P. could read and I believe write Russian but could not speak it. Bob ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marie Ball" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, July 26, 2014 9:04 AM Subject: [NFK] Re Literacy of the population 1841 > This has been a very interesting dialogue. I am reading a book by > Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe about the crossover between oracy and literacy > in Anglo-Saxon times. Something she mentions is that predictive > orthography speeds up our modern reading times. Spelling in England was > not standardised until some time in the Victorian era, I'm not sure when > exactly. Readers in the early Middle Ages read out loud, even if alone. I > wonder when that ceased to be so? We are so used to silent reading. As > people have mentioned, although we consider reading and writing as two > halves of a whole, that was not the case in the past when they were > separate skills. Marie > >