Imagine you’re holding a brand-new smartphone. You’re careful not to scratch the screen, right? Now, imagine if just by typing a text message, you accidentally snapped the entire phone in half. That was the nightmare facing writers in South India thousands of years ago. To see how they solved it, we have to look at Tamil. It is widely recognised as the oldest living language in the world, with a written history that stretches back over two millennia. Long before the printing press, ancient...