Re: boustrophedon in Re: yet another romance conlang

Steg Belsky wrote:
-
> I thought it'd look cool, not cute...
Sure.  Maybe in one or two documents somewhere.  As the usual practice
of the whole language?  Fuggetaboutit.

> 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.
Faster to write, maybe, especially if you are carving on stone or something.
I can flick my eyeball back to the beginning of the line pretty #*(@# fast.

> 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?
Naah.  Literacy to Jews has always meant Hebrew literacy, since that's
the language of Scripture.  Hebrew may be extinct as a spoken tongue
in your conculture, but I can't believe it's extinct as a written one.
So using Hebrew script for French, German, Greek, Arabic, Aramaic, etc. instead
of the usual scripts is just automatic: if you know one script,
you tend to use it for all languages, which is why so many languages
either use Latin script exclusively or at least have a romanized form
today.

> 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.
This is a strong point, actually: people of different origins might
use different scripts.  But not every other line!

> 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).
Reasonable.

> 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.  :-)
Any student of mine who did that would find himself on the other end of
big fat zero.

--

Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis vom dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@...>
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