What direction does your language go in?

In Japanese, vertical writing is used in novels and newspapers but textbooks and almost of all web articles are written horizontally.

The directionality of east Asian scripts like chinese is not just due to writing on scrolls, but how the scrolls were constructed. Early scrolls in ancient China were constructed of strips of bamboo bound together vertically. Thus each "line" of text was written from top to bottom on one strip.

Theoretically it is possible that the direction is alternating. So in one line its from left to right and in the next line its from right to left. That works best in long lines, when reading you don't have to zake your eyes from the script a go back to the start of the line, you just go down to the next line.

I'm surprised you didn't mention Oxturn writing (Boustrophedon). My understanding was that originally in ancient times in the Mediterranean they would alternate directions, as would an ox when plowing a field. Later, this seemed to be standardized in a single direction, with the western languages (Latin, Greek) preferring left to right and the eastern (Arabic, Hebrew) preferring right to left.

Now you know the reason why the proper way to read manga is usually from right to left; while the Japanese language itself has changed significantly over the years, nowadays using the Western format of going left to right, the traditional style of top to bottom, right to left has already been so deeply ingrained in Japanese culture that its influence still stands out.

There’s also boustrophedon, which is when the lines alternate between LRTB and RLTB. Very early forms of the Greek script used it.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="556">9:16</a> There's something very interesting that happens with signs in Chinese (and presumably also Japanese and Korean). The languages are traditionally written TBRL, but can also be written LRTB in modern times. In general, vertically oriented signs will usually be written TBRL, and horizontally oriented signs will usually be written LRTB. However, that is not always the case, and it's entirely reasonable for a horizontal sign to be written TBRL, which an result in a single line that reads from right to left. This is particularly common of signs that are intended to look traditional and of signs that are actually old. For example, the front gate of Chicago's Old Chinatown has what appears to be "公為下天" on the side facing outward and "恥廉義禮" on the side facing inward, both written horizontally in one line, but both are intended to be read from right to left because they are TBRL and therefore actually read "天下為公" ("the world belongs to the public", a quote from Confucius's Book of Rites) and "禮義廉恥" (the four social bonds, "propriety, justice, integrity and honor," from the anonymously written Guanzi).

This topic is actually very interesting and less talked about. Looking forward for more like this 😊

Arabic calligraphy: You dare confine me to your systems?

The Empire of Japan once used both TBRL and RLTB. You can see newspaper titles at that time were written in RLTB. After WWII, Japan abandoned RLTB and shifted into LRTB. So Japanese language has experienced three writing directions: TBRL, RLTB, and LRTB.

Egyptian hieroglyphs direction of reading is determined by which way the hieroglyphs are facing.

About cuneiform being Left->Right or Top->Bottom: Originally, it was written Top->Bottom. I'm guessing that as most people are right-handed, they were starting to write from right-hand side(no pun intended). But at some time, they decided that it was easier to write it horizontally. To make it less confusing to read, they rotated the symbols 90° counter-clockwise when writing. That's probably when it went from TBRL to LRTB. Feel free to correct me, I'm simply someone who is curious about such things.

I'm waiting for you to talk about boustrophedon. Tolkien's Sarati -- glyphs for a universal phonetic script -- can be written in whatever direction you want.

I’m trying to learn Vietnamese as an English speaker

The Ogham writing in the Old Irish went LRBT, and used boustrophedon as well.

Japanese pre-WW2 wrote horizontal right-to-left too in many cases.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="562">9:22</a> Actually the newspaper shown here (dated 1879-01-25 Gregorian) is an example of TB‐RL and RL‐TB used together. The horizontal lines here are read right‐to‐left. The left‐to‐right direction for horizontal writing became the default around 1950 (although it did exist as an option before then, if a publication dealt with western‐style mathematical or musical notations in Japanese).

Chinese, Korean, and Japanese actually can be written in four ways: right to left>up to down. up to down>right to left, up to down>left to right. left to right > up to down. basically traditionally it's right to left but can be written vertically or horizontally, horizontally for door plaques and other thing requiring wider than tall writing, , vertically for books. but then western influence added the left to right direction was introduced.

its definitely possible to mix directions with themselves too. the Gallifreyan alphabet is written on counterclockwise circles to form words, and those words are arranged counterclockwise in a bigger circle. whole paragraphs are also enclosed in bigger circles and arranged the same way to form much larger texts. its like directionality inception

Hello, conlanger here. I have decided, in my conlang, the direction will be LRBT coz a traditional document (made of paper) will be held with both hands, where one hand is at the top and one is at the bottom. It will also be held very close to your eyes so that you can only see one line at a time. As time passes, your hands which are holding the document will get tired and will start to slowly go down, thus making it easier to read a LRBT language.

Then you have mad lass Su Hui from the 2nd or 3rd century China who wrote a poem that can be read from any direction (including diagonally and in a circle) and still make sense.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="180">3:00</a> You forgot how Acient Greek can be like the ox turns (while plowing): to the left then to the right repeat going top to bottom. This is due it being written on stone walls and it be easier to continue where you left off then going back to the edge you started at. Source: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon

Circular Gallifreyan is a script with spiral direction

You should also mention the distinction between letters that "sit" on the line and ones that "hung" from it.

Another variant you could mention is the way newspapers are written into columns, reading left-to-right to about a quarter of the width of the page, then top-to-bottom for the next line, and then left-to-right again for the next column. I think the Mayans wrote in a way similar to this as well.

What’s interesting about Arabic is that the words are read right-left but numbers are read left-right.

Surprised you didn't mention boustrophedon or Egyptian hieroglyphs. I guess that if we'd all grown up reading boustrophedon then there'd be fewer reading mistakes made due to accidentally skipping a line. Love the Hanunoo script idea of writing in whatever direction is away from the body. Do you think that as a lefthanded person I might be able to get a free pass on writing English from right to left to avoid smudging my ink if I cite your video?

The only place I've seen English words in a diagonal l-r or r-l are Word Search Puzzles

Woah! The direction change based on script used that you mention @<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="593">9:53</a> is something we also do in Arabic! I never even realized that we're doing it but we write in Arabic from right to left, but then when texting friends/family using the Latin script, we go from left to right even though we're still using the Arabic language.

You have no idea how Chinese characters can be so randomly arranged. Mostly they are left-to-right and top-to-bottom alright, but right-to-left is also accepted as that is the only traditional horizontal order. In very rare cases of XX temple or XX hall, to dignify the place, it can be written as "X temple X" or "X hall X". I got confused too all the time.

I believe it was the Linear A script of The Minoans that was written in spirals on disks

It was my understanding that runic inscriptions were typically LR, with RL occurring occasionally and being indicated by mirroring the individual runes. I don't recall exactly where I learned this, but I'm pretty sure it was in relation to Futhark. I suppose the reverse could have been more common for Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, but that would seem odd.

Reminding you to make a video about the connection between Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Also, another writing direction option is alternating left to right and right to left for lines, or boustrophedon, which was used in some period to write ancient Greek.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="305">5:05</a> That script is old church slavonic, if I'm not mistaken. It seems to be a romanian prayer. Does anyone know where to find this?

Speaking of writing direction, Hieroglyph is the most interesting writing system I know. It depends on where their Gods are; If Gods are sitting left of the script, all people and animals of each character turn towards them showing respect, which means you read the script left to right.

Scripts like arabic can be interesting because in forms like nastaliq the word can go diagonally from top right to bottom left Also arabic calligraphy can be read and written a variety of ways… most of the complex calligraphy is read left to right, bottom to top. Scripts like greek and latin used to be written in boustrophedon, ie, they changed the writing direction every alternate sentence, even mirroring the letters sometimes… this was done to prevent the breaking of one’s reading flow and also to mimic the continuous nature of spoken language. The mongolian script became vertical after people decided to flip the previous left to right script by 90 degrees, or so I remember having read.

I think I remember that Latin used to go from left to right, then right to left for the next line down and the letters were written mirrored.

@<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="257">4:17</a>. There is a case. Tamil a South Indian language has 3 scripts. Although only one is used majorly. One is grantha, one is arwi and the most common one is Vattezhuthu. The Vattezhuthu and Grantha scripts go from left to right whereas the arwi script (used by a few Tamil Muslims) goes from right to left.

What is Cascagian? This language is mentioned in Gulliver's Travels as being written from bottom to top.

This a very interesting channel.I have always been interested in wod and name origins.I learned Chinese was read the way it is at about age 10 from a friend who lived next door.For the most part, Mongolian is written in Cyrillic now

And there's Egyptian Hieroglyphics that can go either direction depends on which direction the glyphs are facing at.

The right to left is common on clay tablets not due to holding the tablet but holding the chisel in your left hand and hammer in the right

In Arabic it’s from right-left but in case of number you write from left-right then continue write the words right-left after you write numbers

This also predicts how people visualize time as directionality. As in a time in the future being left, right, up, down (or even forward or back for some cultures)

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="225">3:45</a> as far as I know, the reason that no writing systems write the next line above the starting line is that its just way more convenient to go down a page than up it.

What about languages that are written in boustrophedon? Any in use today?

"What happens when a line comes to an end" sounds like a crisis that my friend constantly has

as a left-handed person i agree that it is hard to write Left to right without smudging the ink

🤔 . . . I can imagine how each line could be read upwards, regardless if the line(s) are read left to right or right to left: they’re written on bricks & each brick is laid out as a means of storing that knowledge. However, as they stack, the result(s) become obvious: the older entries are on the bottom while the newer ones are on top…

Regarding spiral scripts, take a look at the Linear A script. =)

If I understand what I've seen correctly, The Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) languages were often written such that the text looped back on itself. That is a left to right line might be continued below moving right to left. Interestingly, the symbols that were sounds did not necessarily occur in the order in which they were pronounced. The symbols were apparently arranged to be visually pleasing...That must have made deciphering the scripts maddeningly difficult. Plus, there were three scrips used. That must have been fun.

Even though Chinese is written top to bottom then right to left, each individual characters are mostly written from left to right, top to bottom.

There is a lot of evidence that Ancient Egyptian hyrogliphics could be written and read in any direction; including bottom to top. As this would have made reading pillars easier

As someone who writes in English I am now trying to use both left to right and right to left because I got inspired by Leonardo da Vinci and early Latin and Greek scripts

Ogham script (was used to write the Old Irish) is bottom to top… and then it goes stranger. The letters were carved on stone edges, starting from the bottom and then following the edge, so long lines can go bottom-to-top, right-to-left, top-to-bottom.

I'm curious how writing directionality affects page order in codex-style books. For instance, in English, you would read the left page before the right page, but in Japanese, it's typically the right before the left, as far as I know.

We did indeed learn this when we were learning to write in school. If you think about the age though, it is likely that it is something we forget learning. I must have just been interested in it.

another example of directional flexibility is with words written for drivers on roads, where the lines appear to go bottom-up ("left turn only", "bus lane"). more broadly, it's probably worth distinguishing between lines going top-down on a vertical surface vs. towards-away on a horizontal surface

I see you mentioned runes, but having watched a lot of Dr Jackson Crawford's videos I think I can say that runes were really free-form -- they would change direction, and they would even write in spirals.

Uf you think about it Korean is really weird cause you basically change directions within a syllable . A syllable like 이 (i) is written right to left while 는 ( neun ) is written top to bottom . And a syllable like this 웒 (wonh) goes from top to bottom , then from right to left then on a next row again right to left .

Other comments have commented the historical use of bourstrophedon. I would like to add too that historically we do have spiral texts too in linear a and b.

The mongolian script is derived from syriac which is derived from aramaic, which had semitic type writing order. When it was introduced to mongols, it was rotated to the left and became the unique direction it has. RLTB became TBLR.

As a lefty, I've always hated the direction we write.

Gallifrean is written counter clockwise. Beautiful

There are a few scripts which are confined on a singular line and will follow that line however it goes, though I don't know if these still are in use. In these there's either some start of line marker or the individual glyphs are distinct enough to tell the direction of the line. As for conlangs, while I don't know of any that do spirals, I have seen at least one attempt at constructing a Gallifreyan-inspired script that constructed sentences as partially-overlapping forms which represented various concepts with different layering to add a new sentence-type structure. It sort of messed with the idea of expanding scope of word to sentence to paragraph, but it wasn't fully fleshed out.

I think it would have been interesting to mention "Boustrophedon". It's a very old way of writing and probably don't used anymore. But the way to write it to write front left to right. Then in the next line goes right to left. Then Left to Right, and so on.

Klawans writes about a patient who lost the ability to read left to right after a stroke. The stroke left him otherwise undamaged. It hit the nerve track that allowed the language center to see outside the central visual field. The patient taught himself Yiddish, which goes right to left, so he had something to read. For most right-handed people language is centered in the left hemisphere, which has direct access to the right half of the visual field. Reading left to right requires less inter-hemisphere communication. The left hemisphere can directly see “what’s coming”. In that sense left to right is “more natural”.

Reminding you to make the video about Chinese, Japanese and Korean ;)

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="645">10:45</a> yeah. Chinese scrolls are not held in hand vertically. Traditionally scrolls (or really just books in general) were strips of bamboo strung together where each column of text was one bamboo strip. It would also just be rolled into one cylinder shape rather than a pair like you'd see with medieval European scrolls. And thus the same convention was used when paper was invented.

I've heard of some ancient languages that alternate between left-to-right and right-to-left every other line. I think one of the earliest versions of Greek script did this.

it's very hard to change the direction of arabic since it's basically always in curisve. and the way letters connect and look like are based on the direction. It's very confusing and hard to read if we write the letters separaetly as i've seen attempts to write it using a computer lol. Sometimes they end up writing them left to right and the words are torn apart

Runes were actually written in either direction, but could also use boustrophedon or be written in a circle like on many runestones

I hope someone creates conlangs for LRBT, and RLBT! (Even though it can be just one conlang for both like the Hanunoo Script from the Philippines! They write in BTLR and BTRL!) <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="483">8:03</a>

In Finnish, we read words from left to right after reading the letters from right to left which makes us read the text twice. However, I don't know if this is the same in all languages ​​that use the Latin alphabet and writing system.

Wow, I never thought Hanunoo is supposed to be written from bottom to top and left to right or right to left for the next line.

I'm surprised there's no script that is switching direction with each line, like starting on left going right, next line goes right to left, next one left to right, and so on

Great concept something I've been aware of as long as I can remember, though I don't often think about. When I was very young, my mom had a Chinese friend, so my siblings and I were exposed to this concept early. My dad spent 2 years in Vietnam before he & my mom married, so that was probably discussed fairly often "amongst the grown-ups." My ex husband is Arabic, & I would love to read, write, & speak that too, though I can do none of that. Still, I love the concept!

Directions on roads are often written bottom to top. For example: Zone School 🚘 X-ING PED 🚘

My little brother used to write mirrored, because he felt like directionality was optional and he simply chose the other direction. I don't think it lasted when he started attending school.

futharc runes are often a clockwise spiral going inward

Maybe you can do a name like Kira, Kiera = Names sound that share around the world with similar meaning or opposite meaning .

I feel like TBRL script makes more sense when you think about how LRTB script is related to it: turn a piece of paper with, say, Latin script 90 degrees clockwise and now the words are vertical, top-down arranged right-to-left.

My friend who’s from India went to English school until she moved to the US and she speaks Hindi at home and with family fluently but ask her to read anything or write and she’s clueless

Some languages would sort of "snake" and go right to left, down, then left to right, down, then right to left, etc.

I distinctly remember, in school, being taught that you read from left to right, top to bottom.

You didn't mention hieroglyphics or other picture-symbol languages. That would have been interesting to know about.

I note that some have already commented on the missing out of alternation as a possibility, although I didn't know the precise jargon for that. I would differ on writing left to right being inherently advantageous for right-handed people, though, so I will comment on that. Several times, as a right-handed person, if I'm using a pen whose ink does not dry instantaneously, I can find my hand dragging in the still-moist ink in the last few lines just written, whereas a left-handed person can avoid that as the hand is naturally held off the surface of the paper. On a different directionality, where one world does not entirely comprehend another, I will never forget when my then-very-young nephew, on trying to play a vinyl record, instinctively placed the needle in the middle of the record, probably because CDs are read - as far as I'm aware, so somebody correct me if I'm mistaken - from the inside outwards. Are there any other Millennials amongst the commenters who have made that error? Maybe yourself, Patrick?

My elementary school journals are all left to right, bottom to top. (I wrote in English, mirrored upside-down.)

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="540">9:00</a> how do I know if the writer is left or right handed

Patrick, The early Greek alphabet was written, like its Semitic forebears, from right to left. This gradually gave way to the boustrophedon style, and after 500 bce Greek was always written from left to right. Boustrophedon is an ancient method of writing in which the lines run alternately from right to left and from left to right.

boustrophedon - like 'plowing a field'

Wait, no mention of Boustrophedon?

You didn't mention boustrophedon style where the writing alternates left/right direction on each line. Latin and ancient Greece were at one point.

What about boustrophedon?

Latin used to switch direction at the end of the line.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="465">7:45</a> Please do that video, I would love to see it.

You completely missed boustrophedon, now double your 4x2 grid to 4x4. :D

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="256">4:16</a> doesn't Chinese go left to right and Japanese goes downward?

A specifically remember my teacher saying "Start at the top left."