Why do some languages write from right to left? It seems to me that, given the predominance of right handed people, writing from left to right would be be the more logical choice - your hand doesn’t cover what you’ve just written, and you don’t have to be careful about smudging the ink. I suppose this might just be cultural prejudice on my part, but it seems to make sense. I could of course be missing something crucial here.
If you are not writing with pen and ink, but chiselling the letters into stone, then there probably isn’t much difference.
Not to mention that not all people who write hold their writing utensils in the same way. IIRC, Arabic writers are trained to hold their pens in a more vertical position, thus avoiding the dreaded ink stains.
Personally, I’m left handed. I’ve always wished we wrote from right to left…
When I was teaching at a Jewish school I wondered whether the proportion of left handed pupils would be higher than in the general population… as far as I could tell, it wasn’t (about 10%), which ruined a perfectly good theory about why Hebrew is written from right to left…
Interestingly, there seemed to be a much greater percentage of twins in the school than the world at large, but that’s a different issue…
Grim
AFAIK, the logic behind writing R to L is that you are starting on the side where your writing hand happens to be. As said before, proper penmanship ensures your hand doesn’t drag in the ink, if you happen to be using that medium. (Note that depending on writing style, you could theoretically drag you hand in the ink if you were writing L to R. This was something of an issue in my grammar school days, when we were taught penmanship and used fountian pens.)
IIRC, on some very old Greek inscriptions, the writing is R to L, and in others L to R; the switch is seemingly random. There is also a method that trnaslates as “as the ox plows” where it goes one direction on one line and then reverses direction on the next.
I imagine that if you’re chiseling into rock, with your chisel in your left hand and your smashing implement in your right, that it would be advantageous to go from right to left, so you can see what you’ve written so far without your left arm getting in the way.
The “oxplow” writing is called boustrophedon I believe and much early writing is done that way. Why did that stop since it obviates the need for a flyback at the end of each line.
Well, FWIW, Cecil wrote an all-too-brief column on Is there a physical reason we read from left to right?. Obviously there is no physical reason, and he gives a mention of boustrophedon.
I once saw a film about Islamic art that showed a calligrapher at work, and it said that Arabic is written from right to left, so that it goes inward toward the heart. This was giving it a Sufi spiritual significance.
See Writing Systems of the World by Akira Nakanishi for an analysis of all the different directions writing can run. Appendix 2, “The Directions in Which Scripts Are Written,” p. 112-114, distinguishes no fewer than 9 ways to lay out lines of script on the page, with examples from real languages.
Aramaic, like Arabic and Hebrew, goes right to left. Uyghur script of Central Asia was written in Sogdian script, which was Aramaic used by Central Asian Nestorians. Mongolian adopted the Uyghur-Aramaic script, which was at first right to left — but then rotated it 90 degrees counterclockwise so that it would run alongside Chinese vertical lines.
The only other use of boustrophedon lines, besides Ancient Greek, was in the Hungarian runic alphabet derived from Old Turkic Orkhon inscriptions; it was used by the Székelys until the 19th century. (I want to persuade the Hungarians to go back to writing in these runes; it would look so cool.)
Divehi (used in the Maldive Islands) was once written left to right, but when they began borrowing Arabic words they switched it to go right to left, so that Arabic loanwords in Arabic script could be incorporated right into the text, much as authors once cited Greek words in the Greek alphabet, like this: ‘[symbol]EllhnikoV[/symbol].
Egyptian hieroglyphics went any old way: right, left, up, down, you name it. The starting point was indicated by the direction the human and animal figures faced.
Chinese lines of text traditionally went vertically … which is the best way of all to avoid dragging those wide Chinese sleeves in the ink … but nowadays Chinese and Japanese more often are printed left to right, to allow inline inclusion of English text. Just as Mongolian turned vertical to accommodate Chinese, now Chinese itself has gone horizontal to accommodate English.
But that’s not all there is to it. Traditional vertical Chinese writing, with the columns going right to left, is still used. Nakanishi included a facsimile of a Taiwan newspaper with no fewer than three directions on the same page: top to bottom, left to right, and right to left!
But the oddest text layout of all has to be on the rongo rongo tablets of Easter Island: The first line goes right side up, then the second line is upside down, the third line is right side up again, and the fourth line is upside down again, and so on. The reader would have to turn the tablet around after each line.
Chinese went vertically because the original writing medium was on slats of bamboo. Well, okay, you could argue bones, but when writing started to take off it was on bamboo, which could then be bundled together for longer messages. That’s the top down thing.
I’ve heard explanations on the right to left thing, but can’t remember what they were. As someone stated above, writing Chinese with a brush is in a different position than with a pen.
It is still common to see Chinese going from right to left, left to right, and either vertically or horizontally. About the only thing you never see is from bottom to top. I’d say in China today, the majority is printed left to right horizontally.
Newspapers in my experience tend to be pretty standardized although ads may be an exception.
That’s right, China Guy, the right-to-left Chinese writing in the newspaper I cited was in an ad.
Just to add to a hijack:
Interestingly enough, the way the Egyptians decided to write (right to left, left to right, vertically or horizontally) depended on the aesthetics of what they were writing on.
Pretty much, they did it one way depending on what looked the coolest.