boustrophedon in Re: yet another romance conlang

On Wed, 5 Jan 2000 09:56:00 -0500 John Cowan <jcowan@...>
writes:
> ACK PFFT!  Jews have always used the Hebrew alphabet to write their
> special languages (though Ladino is often written *more Romanico*
> nowadays).
> Please lose this over-cute feature.
> <jcowan@...>
.

Cute?
I thought it'd look cool, not cute...
and that it might be slightly faster to read, since you don't have to go
back and find the beginning of the next line if it's right below the end
of the previous line.
And, it might not be such an airtight equation of judeo-languages being
written in hebrew characters, since those are all diasporan, and ju:dajca
is supposed to be judean.  could the RL languages have been written in
hebrew in order to differentiate them from the surrounding language that
they were derived from?
And with the language spreading out from roman imperial colonists, i
doubt the original speakers of the language would have switched over to
hebrew script for the benefit of the judeans they were trying to
overwhelm.  it's like the black hole in the book _earth_ by david brin,
making the best out of a case of (albeit metaphorical linguistic) rape.

And anyway, i said it's "commonly" written that way.....with the highly
fractured conculture i'm trying to develop, there'd be some factions
(unassimilated colonists, hellenists) who would write only in the latin
script, and others (cultural zealots, religious officials) who would
write only in the hebrew script (if people descended idealogically from
zealots would speak in a romance language at all).  On computers, of
course, the latin script would be more popular.  But i would write it
boustrophedon, and i expect that a student rushing through rewriting an
essay before the test is about to end would write it boustrophedon too in
order to save whatever measly seconds that it takes to go back to the
beginning of the line.  :-)


-Stephen (Steg)
 "Eze-guvdhab wa'hrikh-a tze, / "zhoutzii wa'esh," i eze-mwe."