8 ms·

My 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 let

by antman 4y ago

My 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 ago
I don't get it. Do you have an example that you can show this happening in? Thanks!
- teruakohatu 4y ago
  I think the OP means that E and Ǝ would be equivalent.
  - maf8987678 4y ago
    This actually works fine with latin letters. Think of for example advertising or graffiti where this trick is used sometimes to gain attention.
    - OJFord 4y ago
      Not all of them, depending on font (and case) - bdpq, sz.
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        It 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 ago
  Here 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
omneity 4y ago
I wonder if this horizontal glyph direction has some sort of meaning lost to the sands of time. Armchair speculating outloud, maybe it’s not purely aesthetic and could imply some sort of past/future tense?
- demetrius 4y ago
  I don't think it does. Chinese, Japanese and Korean had been using vertical writing for centuries, only switching to horizontal ones around 20th century for interoperability with Western writing (such as math or chemical formulae). Mongolian script, from the link presented here, has actually switched from being horizontal to being vertical (under influence of Chinese).
rvense 4y ago
My understanding is that hieroglyphics can be read and written in either direction, and that the animal characters in particular give it away, if they're face right you read from the right and vice versa.
- Tuna-Fish 4y ago
  Yes, and there are some inscriptions where this is used, for example in "speech bubbles", where two figures facing each other on a wall talk to each other, with the texts flowing in different directions.
paulusthe 4y ago
It was the attempt to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs into Phoenician which led to all of today's alphabetic languages. Archaeologists recently found a temple in the Jordan area in which the earliest known attempt at an alphabetic language was written; it was a translation between Egyptian and Phoenician. Alphabetic, non pictographic languages are an order of magnitude easier to learn and express than pictographic languages, which require rote memorization of hundreds to thousands of pictographs and their modifiers. In contrast, the language you're reading this post in allows you to guess the sound of the words by the spelling, which is simply impossible in, say, Mandarin.
- alasarmas 4y ago
  I agree with your point in general, that alphabetic systems are easier to pick up. However, it’s not true that you can’t guess the sound of a Chinese character. From Wikipedia [0]: Radical–phonetic compounds, in which one component (the radical) indicates the general meaning of the character, and the other (the phonetic) hints at the pronunciation. An example is 樑 (liáng), where the phonetic 梁 liáng indicates the pronunciation of the character and the radical 木 ('wood') indicates its meaning of 'supporting beam'. Characters of this type constitute around 90% of Chinese logograms. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram
  - akavi 4y ago
    Note that the "phonetic" component can become incredibly strained in modern Chinese languages. Eg, take the character "俞"; in Mandarin, it's pronounced "yú". However, it's used as a phonetic component in: 1) 输: pronounced "shū" 2) 偷: pronounced "tōu" (There are even worse examples which I can't think of in the moment)
  - cyberax 4y ago
    Phonetics don't really tell you the tone. Also, there are tons and tons of exceptions.
    - lIl-IIIl 4y ago
masukomi 4y ago
I like that. Mine is boustrophedon. When you get to the end of a line, you continue the next line starting at the same end. I know the ancient Greeks used it. I don't know who else. I keep pondering how hard it would be to write a text editor that handled that correctly. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon

by antman 4y ago

haskal 4y ago

I don't get it. Do you have an example that you can show this happening in? Thanks!

teruakohatu 4y ago
I think the OP means that E and Ǝ would be equivalent.
- maf8987678 4y ago
  This actually works fine with latin letters. Think of for example advertising or graffiti where this trick is used sometimes to gain attention.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    Not all of them, depending on font (and case) - bdpq, sz.
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      It 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 ago
Here 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

omneity 4y ago

I wonder if this horizontal glyph direction has some sort of meaning lost to the sands of time. Armchair speculating outloud, maybe it’s not purely aesthetic and could imply some sort of past/future tense?

demetrius 4y ago
I don't think it does. Chinese, Japanese and Korean had been using vertical writing for centuries, only switching to horizontal ones around 20th century for interoperability with Western writing (such as math or chemical formulae). Mongolian script, from the link presented here, has actually switched from being horizontal to being vertical (under influence of Chinese).

rvense 4y ago

My understanding is that hieroglyphics can be read and written in either direction, and that the animal characters in particular give it away, if they're face right you read from the right and vice versa.

Tuna-Fish 4y ago
Yes, and there are some inscriptions where this is used, for example in "speech bubbles", where two figures facing each other on a wall talk to each other, with the texts flowing in different directions.

paulusthe 4y ago

It was the attempt to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs into Phoenician which led to all of today's alphabetic languages. Archaeologists recently found a temple in the Jordan area in which the earliest known attempt at an alphabetic language was written; it was a translation between Egyptian and Phoenician. Alphabetic, non pictographic languages are an order of magnitude easier to learn and express than pictographic languages, which require rote memorization of hundreds to thousands of pictographs and their modifiers. In contrast, the language you're reading this post in allows you to guess the sound of the words by the spelling, which is simply impossible in, say, Mandarin.

alasarmas 4y ago
I agree with your point in general, that alphabetic systems are easier to pick up. However, it’s not true that you can’t guess the sound of a Chinese character. From Wikipedia [0]: Radical–phonetic compounds, in which one component (the radical) indicates the general meaning of the character, and the other (the phonetic) hints at the pronunciation. An example is 樑 (liáng), where the phonetic 梁 liáng indicates the pronunciation of the character and the radical 木 ('wood') indicates its meaning of 'supporting beam'. Characters of this type constitute around 90% of Chinese logograms. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram
- akavi 4y ago
  Note that the "phonetic" component can become incredibly strained in modern Chinese languages. Eg, take the character "俞"; in Mandarin, it's pronounced "yú". However, it's used as a phonetic component in: 1) 输: pronounced "shū" 2) 偷: pronounced "tōu" (There are even worse examples which I can't think of in the moment)
- cyberax 4y ago
  Phonetics don't really tell you the tone. Also, there are tons and tons of exceptions.
  - lIl-IIIl 4y ago

masukomi 4y ago

I like that. Mine is boustrophedon. When you get to the end of a line, you continue the next line starting at the same end. I know the ancient Greeks used it. I don't know who else. I keep pondering how hard it would be to write a text editor that handled that correctly. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon