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