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Not that unusual. Japanese, Korean, and traditional Chinese are primarily written vertically, in columns right to left: https://i.imgur.com/Jai2Qcm.png https:/
by retrac 6y ago
Not that unusual. Japanese, Korean, and traditional Chinese are primarily written vertically, in columns right to left: https://i.imgur.com/Jai2Qcm.png https://i.imgur.com/Jai2Qcm.png The common exception is technical works, and translations, which from the early 20th century onward are often horizontal and left-to-right to allow using the Latin alphabet, math equations, etc.
Well, not quite. That was the situation until very recently. It's now mostly horizontal. Almost everything on a computer is horizontal. The first Korean newspaper to switch to horizontal text did so in 1988. It was universal by the mid-90s. Japanese is probably the most resistant and has its traditionalist holdouts in novels and some print newspapers. But horizontal text is ascendant there too.
While those languages are basically compatible with writing in any direction, this shift is mostly because software can't handle vertical text. It was terrible when computer typesetting first took off. Even today for publication quality, it probably requires specialized software. So the answer is that UI's don't handle it. It's almost always a disaster in software. The traditional writing system of several major world languages is simply not properly supported by most software, and much still fails completely.
An observation to close with: perhaps ironically, the Mongolian script is from the Syriac alphabet that went along the silk road route, and is distantly related to the Latin alphabet. It was rotated 90 degrees probably for no other reason than because it works well alongside vertical Chinese. It seems that rotating to get along is a recurring theme.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoModern Chinese punctuation marks don't really work in a vertical format.
- retrac 6y agoI'm not fluent, but how so? The 。or ，or 、seem fine when centred. The《 and 》 or 「 and 」get rotated and also look fine. The bigger issue is Arabic numerals, and mixed case or long Latin alphabet words. (Though 2 - 4 letter acronyms like USA or FIFA, one per square, actually fit almost perfectly.) I always thought bracket quotes looked exactly like what they are, a container for words: https://i.imgur.com/IlwSjnZ.png https://i.imgur.com/IlwSjnZ.png -- For example, this sentence is written in "vertical Chinese". (Screenshot generated with LibreOffice Write, which can just about handle basic documents in vertical format.)
- thaumasiotes 6y agoOK, but now you're saying that, to get working punctuation, we need to replace every glyph with a different glyph. I view this as support for my claim that the existing glyphs don't work in that context.
- gumby 6y agoIt’s just presentation.
- sauropterygia 6y ago> It was rotated 90 degrees probably for no other reason than because it works well alongside vertical Chinese Chinese (and Japanese and Korean), when written vertically, the collums are written right to left. In the Mongolian script, the columns are left to right, so I don't know how well it works with Chinese. > Japanese is probably the most resistant and has its traditionalist holdouts in novels and some print newspapers Almost every book I have in Japanese, including Japanese-Japanese dictionaries, Kanji dictionaries, kids science books, temple books and even a bilingual Japanese and English Shogi book are written with vertical text (English is horizontal in this last one). My Japanese cookbooks have text in both directions. Manga text is written vertically, to the point even most translated manga has their pages going right-to-left as their Japanese counterparts. Japanese ebooks can be read vertically too: https://www.preining.info/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/PW-GLO-Japanese.jpg https://www.preining.info/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/PW... I also frequently see very recent Japanese lessons texts and questions all vertically. So it's definetly not just on novels and some newspapers. You are correct about the smart phone apps and software in general though. > this shift is mostly because software can't handle vertical text. Yes it can. I remember being able to print vertical Japanese almost 20 years ago. > So the answer is that UI's don't handle it. It's almost always a disaster in software It does not have to be: https://tategaki.github.io/awards/ https://tategaki.github.io/awards/ edits: orthography, added mention to ebooks
- numpad0 6y agoI’m not sure whether situations in CJK matters here, Mongolian seems cursive only to me. Cursive was not included in typed CJK texts and what remains is block forms which can be arranged in any orientation(though vertical top down and horizontal left to right are strongly preferred), so CJK are probably easier than Mongolian.
- retrac 6y agoUnicode has reasonable support for combining forms these days in cursive and similar scripts: Arabic, Devanagari, etc. Mongolian is, I suppose, the combination of everything tricky in text display. Ligatures and joining forms, vertical, left-to-right. I think it's the only living writing system with this particular combination.