for - Brehon Laws - of early Ireland - etymology - glossary - reading between the lines - adjacency - Brehon Laws - Indyweb - reading between the lines - glossary

adjacency - between - Brehon Laws - Indyweb - reading between the lines - etymology - glossary - adjacency relationship - Brehon Laws of early Ireland emerged from the people themselves over many generations - and were not imposed by some authority - For a long time, these laws were orally transmitted and memorized - When writing emerged, the style of writing used by the early Irish was to write with many gaps in between written verses of text - for the purpose of readers to be able to be writers and contribute to the text with their own perspectives - In other words, they were early annotators! - The etymology of the world glossary comes from "gloss" from the practice of writing meaning between the lines - "Glosses were common in the Middle Ages, usually rendering Hebrew, Greek, or Latin words into vernacular Germanic, Celtic, or Romanic. Originally written between the lines, later in the margins." ( https://www.etymonline.com/word/glossary)

source - Zoom meeting this evening with Paul and Trace, as Paul introduced from his understanding of his Irish roots

The difficult thing to pick apart here is the writer's intention and the reader's reception and base of knowledge.

In particular a lot of imaginative literature is based on having a common level of shared context to get a potentially wider set of references and implied meanings which are almost never apparent in a surface reading. As a result literature may use phrases from other unmentioned sources which the author has read/knows, but which the reader is unaware. Those who read Western literature without any grounding in the stories within the Bible will often obviously be left out of the conversation which is happening, but which they won't know exists.

Indigenous knowledge bases have this same feature despite the fact that they're based on orality instead of literacy.

Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and surely other researchers must often "read against the grain" which historian Keith Thomas defines as reading a text, not so much for what the author was explicitly trying to directly communicate to the reader, but for the small tidbits that the author through the text "incidentally or unintentionally reveals."