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Cool. There is actually a W3C draft spec for Mongolian script![1] We tend to assume that left-to-right script is a law of nature but it is just one of many var
by nologic01 4y ago
Cool. There is actually a W3C draft spec for Mongolian script![1]
We tend to assume that left-to-right script is a law of nature but it is just one of many variations that have been invented and used across space and time. Right-to-left (Arab / Hebrew) [2] is well known but a most intriguing one used in antiquity by Greeks and others is Boustrophedon (alternating from left-to-right / right-to-left).[3]
Boustrophedon mode is in one sense the optimal script form. At the one-time expense of having to learn to recognize letters and words both ways one can then (in principle) speed up reading as the eyeballs don't need to jump across the page to start a new line :-)
[1] https://www.w3.org/International/mlreq/ https://www.w3.org/International/mlreq/
[2] https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-scripts https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-scripts
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
- pkd 4y agoThe runic script (futhark) could also be written l2r and r2l in alternating lines.
- dylan604 4y agoThis seems pretty efficient as there's no deadheading to get back to the other end of the line. When doing puzzles like word searches or scanning things laid out in grids like news article headlines, I do this l2r->r2l type of scanning. I've even caught myself using t2b->b2t scanning as well in these types of situations. It's just much more efficient
- kijin 4y agoOnly LF and no CR? Sounds Unixy enough for me.
- jl6 4y agoNow this is the kind of nano-optimization I can get behind!
- topper-123 4y agoKorean can be written left to right or top to bottom, which is very cool.
- AdamN 4y agoI'm guessing it was top to bottom and then during the modernization process, left to right was added? It's smart that both forms are allowed though as I could imagine modifying a written language takes many years and massive public effort.
- kijin 4y agoYep, it used to be top to bottom, and the columns were arranged right to left. As a side effect of this recent transition, it's not particularly difficult to read Korean right to left, either. It's the same in Chinese and Japanese. It helps a lot that the letters are designed fit into individual square blocks. The blocks can be arranged any way you want. There have been internet memes, for example, written to mean one thing when you read left to right and a completely different thing top to bottom.
- glandium 4y agoNote that Japanese went with horizontal right to left for a while before going with left to right. I don't know if Chinese or Korean did the same.
- mytailorisrich 4y agoI think Chinese was usually written right to left when written horizontally. This can still be seen for instance at the front of temples and gates.
- icegreentea2 4y agoI think you mean vertically. But yes, Chinese was written top down, right to left. The PRC basically switched over to left-right, top-bottom right away (it kind of went hand in hand with the simplification project). Taiwan for example kept the traditional format for a lot longer. When I was learning Mandarin in the late 90s, all our imported material from Taiwan was still top-down, right to left. Here's an example Taiwanese newpaper from 1993 (yes, that's Michael Jackson) https://www.taipeitimes.com/images/2021/08/29/p08-210829-frontpage1.jpg https://www.taipeitimes.com/images/2021/08/29/p08-210829-fro... You can see the body text is arranged top-bottom, right to left, and the headlines employ a mixture of approaches.
- rvense 4y agoI'm not an expert on alphabetization, but AFAIK kids actually have some trouble getting the letters "the right way round", I think especially if they start very early. They might be learning the abstract shape first and the learn to force it into the self-relative forms like always-left-to-right. Which kind of makes sense, since objects in nature are usually encountered from all sides, orientation is rarely valuable. So in that sense I'm not convinced it's really an expense to have to learn it. And anecdotally, my son when he was 3-4, when presented with a grid of items would tend to go over it row by row in alternative directions, like writing in boustrophedon. And as you say it would also make very long lines of text more readable - I think Greek inscriptions often have ludicrous line lengths, like several meters. So there it's not just your eyeballs that are jumping, you actually have to walk back to the start of the next line!
- Max-q 4y agoI once read that the brain stores the shape of the letter and the orientation separately, so both have to be learned.
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y agokids are excellent at picking information because their brains by default will attempt "wild" interpretations of the same information. Their brains are the perfect startup in a way, in that they fail quick, they fail often , and they learn immediately. This is also why its hard to do magic tricks with young kids. They will tend to be looking at all the wrong spots. Their brain doesn't pick up on attempted misdirection, it just decide to make a new test happen from a different vantage point.
- antman 4y agoMy favorite is Egyptian which had the extra feature that the letters were equivalent if rotated with respect to the y axis. So if you had an animal looking letter you could place it in a aesthetically pleasing way looking left or right e.g. on each side of a door
- haskal 4y agoI don't get it. Do you have an example that you can show this happening in? Thanks!
- teruakohatu 4y agoI think the OP means that E and Ǝ would be equivalent.
- maf8987678 4y agoThis actually works fine with latin letters. Think of for example advertising or graffiti where this trick is used sometimes to gain attention.
- OJFord 4y agoNot all of them, depending on font (and case) - bdpq, sz.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoIt works fine with all of them. It's true that some letters are mirrored forms of other letters, but that doesn't leave any ambiguity - the form of the letter is oriented to the direction of reading, so "b" is a B when you're reading left-to-right and it's a D when you're reading right-to-left.
- aix1 4y agoHere is an illustration and explanation: https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/images/glyph4.png https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/images/glyph... The whole page: https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/page4.htm https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/page4.htm
- ale42 4y ago> speed up reading as the eyeballs don't need to jump across the page to start a new line :-) Reminds me of dot matrix printers... some could write lines from right to left without needing to go back to start of line, thus alternating directions.
- davchana 4y agoAs a kid I thought if i write English in a mirrored way i.e. right to left, & mirrored, it would be my code script, nobody else can read it. People read it very easily.
- yakubin 4y agoThat’s how Leonardo wrote, because he was left-handed, so it was more practical — it preventing smudging the writing with the wrist. (Except Leonardo didn’t write in English.)
- lupire 4y agoNot just smudging. The entire mechanical act of writing (and everything) is optimized for left handed operation being the mirror image of right-handed operation, since left is mirror image of right.
- orangewindies 4y agoThat was usually in draft mode, since the left-to-right and right-to-left lines wouldn't quite line up perfectly.
- hutzlibu 4y ago"At the one-time expense of having to learn to recognize letters and words both ways" That is a very expensive expense, though. And the result might still be worse. I can quickread a page in a couple of seconds, because my brain memorized the shape of the words and even sentences. It took me years of lots of reading to achieve that. I am not sure if my brain could handle the double amount of shapes, because this is in effect what would be needed. And eye movement is very quick. But feel free to give the experiment a shot and share results. (it should be trivial to write a script that rearranges text that way)
- nologic01 4y ago> That is a very expensive expense, though. And the result might still be worse. That's entirely possible but it is hard to tell without going through the entire learning process. There might be a lot of redundancy (as we can quickly recognize mirror shapes) which if tapped at an early age might make it actually a trivial "add-on". Anecdotally you can learn within minutes to slowly parse script in reverse order. Whether you can ever get to the same speed is not clear. We do know that some cultures did use alternating script (so its clearly not impossible) but we also know that they abandoned it in the end - so there might be some disadvantages. Maybe the reason for eventually adopting uniform LR or RL instead or alternating is not the difficulty of mastering mirror versions, but being able to quickly start reading from any line on a page. For example finding the spot where you left reading, or scanning to find a relevant part. For this task the alternating form is actually less efficient as you need to jump back and forth as you go down (or up :-) the page.
- shubb 4y agoIt shouldn't be too hard to make a chrome pluggin to render comment threads like this in alternative forward and mirror / backward lines. As you say reading mirror writing isn't too hard so you could sort of slowly get good at it while wasting time on HN anyway. Would be a fun silly project might give it a go.
- ugh123 4y agoWow Boustrophedon looks really interesting. Thanks! I asked GPT4 to write a Haiku about Elon Musk in that style. It gave me this: Elon's cosmic sound (⇒) ⇐ Spacetime symphony thrives Starward notes resound (⇒)
- masklinn 4y agoThere’s also scripts written bottom to top (Libyc), and even stranger scripts which are written and read in different directions (Hanunó'o is generally written bottom to top — carved away from the writer really — but read left to right).
- bleuchase 4y agoInteresting side note “boustrophedon” translates roughly into “writing as the ox plows” hence the zigzag.
- SergeAx 4y agoBut left-to-right kinda is a law of nature: most people are right-handed, and to avoid messing with previously written glyphs it is natural to move to the right.