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Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
21

This is like the question - why do clocks run clockwise? they didn’t all used to - in the “good old day” it was 50-50 which way. Typically, the rubes in the sticks take their cue from how the local “center of fashion” does it. If Paris or London has a big clock that does it this way, then everyone will copy it. If Rome did it this way, the churches will usually copy Rome, etc.

This is why the comment about the Torah and scholars. In an ancient promised land of a few tens of thousands, how many are literate? A thousand? How many of those are at the center of learning, not some scribe out in the sticks? A few hundred? The left-handed clumsy writer in charge of Torah school one generation could just decide “I’d rather do right-to-left than this awkward back-and-forth”.

If he lorded it over a generation or two of budding scholars and gave them no choice, in the days of unquestioned authority and petty bureaucrats, one guy could set the style for millenia to come.

Or if some greek guy decided to start chiselling the quotation on the temple of the biggest shrine in the area as LtR; everyone then copies that direction and he’s set the direction of Greek writing for the next 3 millenia.

For example, I read somewhere that the original English bible before King James was done in the protestant Netherlands, since the catholic church was being somewhat touchy about letting the masses see and put their own interpretation on scriptures. Hence, the pronuciation with a dutch accent, “e-now-g-h” for “enuff” means that’s how we spell “enough” nowadays and many other weird english spellings.

22

Among Christian Arabs, at least, music is written left-to-right, so lyrics are written syllable-by-syllable left-to-right, but the syllables themselves are right-to-left.

23

Not so. Sundials in the northern hemisphere go clockwise, and clocks followed suit.

The entire near-eastern and middle-eastern tradition was to write right-to-left, and the earliest Greek writing, adapted from that of the people the Bible knows as the “Canaanites”, was written right-to-left, too. Boustrophedon was an intermediate stage on the way to left-to-right.

Arrggghhhh!

[ul]
[li]England was Protestant long before James VI/I. You may have heard of Elizabeth I, not to mention her brother Edward VI and her father Henry VIII.[/li][li]MnE final “gh” generally descends from ME final yogh (ȝ), which generally descends from OE final “h”, which was pronounced roughly like the “ch” in German “ich” or “ach”. As the sound vanished from English, it moved in various directions, not always uniformly. For example, in novels written in the mid-18th century, or even later, rural characters often pronounce “through” as “thruf”.[/li][/ul]

24

I should also have mentioned that Hindi, etc., puts the digits of numbers in the same order as the West, despite the language being right-to-left. However, this may be because Hindi speaks numbers from low to high (the inimitable Aishwarya Rai was born in the Christian year three and seventy and nine hundred and one thousand).

25

I believe Edward Lost has it right.

Ancient languages using chisels tend to be right to left( or up to down ) because of the left hand resting on the medium, where as modern languages are left to right because the right hand would tend to be on the medium.

26

Please, never, ever, ever post something you “read somewhere.”

Here is a long, long page of English language bibles before the King James.

And here’s some history of enough:

The rest of your post is similar “just-so” stories, with the same level of historic reality.

27

Cyrillic? I would say that the more obvious exception would be Hangul, the modern Korean script. Following the mores of the Chinese sphere of influence, originally written top to bottom then right to left. Up until the 80s, books and newspapers were generally written this way. Today, most text is written left to right, top to bottom. Different punctuation systems between the two as well. Seems to be the general trend for CJK/East Asia.

I find the LtR, TtB better when writing long texts with multiple lines but the flow is better top to bottom especially when writing Chinese. Nice for writing short notes in margins of books. I don’t care at all for the TtB, RtL for writing in pen or pencil because of the smudge thing. On the other hand, it’s nice for calligraphy because the open space is more in front of you.

There is a case where the two systems can lead to confusion and that’s when something is written TtB, RtL with only one character per column, in effect making the characters read RtL.

28

Chinese and Japanese are both traditionally written the same way - vertically, top to bottom, with lines ‘stacked’ right to left. So, you’ll start in the top right corner of a page, end toward the lower left corner.

When written horizontally, Japanese flows left to right. (Typically. There are situations where it will run right to left.)

I don’t know enough about Chinese to know if writing horizontally works the same way.

29

**When Japanese is written horizontally **(e.g., on a website), it’s written the same way as English: starting at the upper left corner, with each row written left-to-right and rows proceeding top-to bottom.

**When Japanese is written vertically **(e.g., in a book), it’s written starting in the upper right corner, with each column written top-to-bottom and columns proceeding right-to-left.

30

… and yes, there are good reasons that early semitic languages were recorded right to left… while modern languages tend to be recorded and read from left to right.

Hold a hammer in your right hand, and a chisel in your left hand… you will see that the natural direction to work is from the right to the left. Try it with a screwdriver and a hammer. Hence, I’ve heard from multiple sources, Hebrew began as a right to left language, as stone workers chiseled letters in rocks.

For written languages that were first recorded on parchment and ink… left to right writing prevents the writing hand from smudging the already written letters.

Was Hebrew really first written with a chisel? I suppose you might argue and research that issue, but I’ve heard reputable scholars make that claim.

In the case of Chinese writing, working downward also solves the smudging problem. Are the columns aligned left to right? That would be consistent with that theory too, if they are, moving the right hand out of the way as each column is completed.

31

[quote=“John_W.Kennedy, post:23, topic:497167”]

Not so. Sundials in the northern hemisphere go clockwise, and clocks followed suit.

The entire near-eastern and middle-eastern tradition was to write right-to-left, and the earliest Greek writing, adapted from that of the people the Bible knows as the “Canaanites”, was written right-to-left, too. Boustrophedon was an intermediate stage on the way to left-to-right.

Arrggghhhh!

[ul]
[li]England was Protestant long before James VI/I. You may have heard of Elizabeth I, not to mention her brother Edward VI and her father Henry VIII.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]

Yes, I even remember Wycliffe, as the other poster’s link provides. Which mentions the work being done outside England due to sensitivities of the clergy - actually, the “Inquisition”. Publication date 1535, the year mentioned, was during the reign of Henry VII (Separation from Rome happened 1533 or so, but I imagine things were “interesting” still in the years before that). Before Henry decided to reform the divorce law, he was a staunch defender of the faith up to and including writing some learned treatises on matters theological.

The initial translation work, as the site mentioned, was done in the 1300’s.

The middle-easter bit is a good point - what IS the writing direction of Cunieform, heiroglyphics?

From Wikipedia -

Originally, pictograms were drawn on clay tablets in vertical columns with a pen made from a sharpened reed stylus, or incised in stone. This early style lacked the characteristic wedge-shape of the strokes.
In the mid-3rd millennium, writing direction was changed to left to right in horizontal rows (rotating all of the pictograms 90° counter-clockwise in the process), and a new wedge-tipped stylus was used which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped (“cuneiform”) signs; these two developments made writing quicker and easier. By adjusting the relative position of the tablet to the stylus, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions.
The Englishman Sir Thomas Herbert in the 1634 edition of his travel book “A relation of some yeares travaile” reported seeing at Persepolis carved on the wall “a dozen lines of strange characters…consisting of figures, obelisk, triangular, and pyramidal” and thought they resembled Greek. However by the 1664 edition he had guessed, correctly, that they represented not letters or hieroglyphics but words and syllables, and furthermore that they were to be read from left to right.

I don’t see any references with a quick search, whether Heiroglyphs or Linear A or B are LtR or RtL. From memory, the Egyptians seemed to like top to bottom too… There is a suggestion that they copied from cuneiform.

So the grouchy Master Of Scribes for the mesopotamian potentate de jour who decided to simplify cuneiform writing in 1000BC has left his mark to this day in LtR writing direction.

I don’t have my books unpacked, but IIRC it was Daniel J. Boorstin’s book “The Discoverers” than mentioned that clocks could run either direction. Like driving on one side or the other (sort of), the tradition as to which way clocks should run eventually sorted itself out as people followed the center of fashion. The “because that’s the way the sundial goes” is as much a Just-So-Story as any other explanation. Up to the 1500’s and even later, IIRC, there are exampels of clocks that run counterclockwise.

The bit about “enough” and “enuff” with the bible translation - unfortunately, this was something I saw either in an Analog SF science column or one by Isaac Asimov. This sort of material is rarely online and searchable, so I must go by “memory”, such as it is. A quick perusal of Project Gutenberg’s Canterbury Tales shows several spellings of “wrought”, “thought”, “brought”, “drought”, “ought”. No indication unless I want to read for an hour or more, whether this is an updated spelling. But I’ll guess that instead it was standard(?) English spelling at the time.

It would be interesting to see whether a statistical study of classical art or ancient art determines that there is a “preferred” direction in the human mind - do portraits tend to look left or right mostly? Do charging and galloping animals, warriors, etc. tend to be headed left or right? Do even car chases in movies tend to go left or right? (I also “read soemwhere” that once a direction is established, the director does not like to mix PoV shots going both ways because it can confuse the viewer).

32

No, as has been mentioned multiple times by multiple folks, Chinese sphere of influence goes Top to Bottom, Right to Left.

Heiroglyphs were written in either direction LtR OR RtL and easy enough to tell by looking at the direction the the figures in the glyphs are facing.

I don’t know about Linear A or B.

33

No, Hindi is written left to right. It is Urdu, basically the same language, that is written right to left.

I’m reminded of a story (possibly apocryphal) I heard about a western NGO working in Pakistan. They were trying to promote the use of oral rehydration salts for babies with diarrhoea to illiterate mothers. They came up with a cartoon strip with a weak looking kid in the first box, the kid being given ORS in the second box and a proud mother holding a healthy, happy baby in the third box. Unfortunately this cartoon was from left to right and the mothers, although illiterate, knew that you read from right to left. The campaign wasn’t a success…

34

Y’all will do well to read and study the archives of the mailing list of Unicode.org, which begins at a time after the original column but still about 20 years ago. This stuff has been discussed there nearly continuously (or it references discussions elsewhere) by those with a professional and/or academic interest in the matter.

35

The latest New Scientist has a fascinating article on undeciphered scripts, although you need to look at the actual magazine to see pictures of examples. For this discussion, here’s a great example.

I need cites. I don’t believe any language was first written with a chisel. That’s far too hard for a first step. You start with marks on a flexible and pliable medium before stylizing it in stone.

I checked my copy and don’t see any mention of this. A search in Google Books reveals only one instance of clockwise in the book and the context doesn’t support you.

36

Perhaps they were all for ease of handling, or they might all have been ambi-dextrous…

When I was a small kid I used to be left-handed but my mother “corrected” that, which for one made me quite clumsy for several years (thanks mum). She probably wasn’t done when I approached school and started reading and writing, because both my parents (being divorced and not speaking, this gave a bit credibility to the story in my eyes) told me independently that when I got a blackboard on an easel, I started writing right-handed from left to right but at the end of the first line swapped the chalk and continued left-handed right to left in mirror letters.

I know it sounds funny but both swore to it so I am tempted to believe them.