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Reading Direction
Posted by Simon Robertson in
2 Nov 2011 — 4:56pm
2 Nov 2011 — 4:56pm
A friend on Facebook recently posted this status "did you know that all languages west of Jerusalem read left to right & all languages east of Jerusalem read right to left".
I'm not convinced this is true, is it?
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2 Nov 2011 — 5:25pm
Of course it isn't true.
2 Nov 2011 — 5:27pm
Do we have references? Examples?
2 Nov 2011 — 5:57pm
Quick, someone alerts Georgians they’ve reading wrong all this time!
Hrant, you will need to convince Armenians.
2 Nov 2011 — 6:13pm
You may show this map to your friend.
More information available in this article.
3 Nov 2011 — 10:56am
There are only about nine languages that read right to left.
Hebrew, Arabic (and Farsi and Urdu) - and Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian.
The latter four read left to right most of the time nowadays. But when they are read vertically, the vertical lines then proceed right to left, and thus books laid out in the traditional way for Chinese will have the front cover located on what appears to be the "back", just as books in Hebrew would.
So, east of Jerusalem, we have Hindi, Thai, Malayalam and Tibetan, for example, that read left to right.
3 Nov 2011 — 11:28am
There are only about nine languages that read right to left.
Directionality is a property of script not language, e.g. Azerbaijani used to be written in Arabic script, switched to Cyrillic in the Soviet era and then Latin post Soviet.
Similarly, many African language used to be (and still to some extent) written in Arabic script (Ajami) and now written in Latin script.
There are more right to left scripts; Syriac, Thaana, N'Ko. Old Italic can be written write to left. Egyptian hieroglyph is written in any direction, its derived scripts are always right to left.
And there boustrophedon where each line is flipped in the other direction.
3 Nov 2011 — 1:28pm
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian. The latter four read left to right most of the time nowadays. But when they are read vertically, the vertical lines then proceed right to left...
Mongolian script is always read vertically and always in columns left-to-right, not right-to-left.
3 Nov 2011 — 1:38pm
Mongolian is even more interesting, it is a descendant of Sogdian script which is written from right to left but rotated 90 degrees, that is why it columns start from left to right unlike other vertical scripts.