Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ    Attic   

Re: Why did Boustrophedon Disappear?

From:Paul Kershaw <ptkershaw@...>
Date:Sunday, March 29, 2009, 22:12
> Jim Rosenberg wrote: > > It is easy to speculate on why this happened. My own theory was that it was > just too hard to teach. Imagine the difficulty of having dyslexia if your > writing system uses boustrophedon (especially with glyphs reversed depending on > the direction.)
Handedness might have been an issue. I wonder if boustrophedon is easier if you switch your writing instrument to the other hand when you change direction. Certainly left-to-right writing with ink advantages right-handed people greatly, since left-handed people have to either hold their hand in an odd position or risk smudging (so sayeth this southpaw ;) ). Likewise, stonework and clay incisions in one direction may have wound being easier than bidirectionally. Of course, fear of moving the hand over previous work can't be the sole criterion, since right-to-left writing is also common. But at any rate, any writing system which is more natural for a single (right) hand would have been preferable within cultures that looked down on using the left hand except when absolutely necessary, than a system that is more natural for switching your instrument to the other hand at the end of each line. Many of the Latin letters are symmetrical, or symmetrical enough that they wouldn't require (much) extra learning: B, H, I, M, N, O, Q, T, U, V, W, X, Y, i, l, m, n, o, t, u, v, w, x, y. It's true that some are mirror images of different symbols (S/Z, s/z, b/d, p/q), but there are few enough of these that they could have been modified. For that matter, English speakers frequently describe (and interpret) Cyrillic Я and И as R and N respectively, despite the utter lack of phonemic similarity (additionally, there are logos which rely on such flips, such as ИIN for the band Nine Inch Nails), suggesting that there's already a predisposition towards flipping such letters, at least in alphabetic systems. You could easily build a variant of Latin with only symmetrical symbols. However, another weakness of boustrophedon: Either you have no symmetrical symbols and have to learn both versions of each symbol, or you need to have some clear indicator of which direction the text is going on a particular line. In handwriting, this could presumably be stroke direction; in logographic systems, such as Ancient Egyptian, it could be (by my understanding) "animal/human logographs point to the end of the line, not the start." My instinct and memory tells me that there are some credible academic opinions on this subject, but I don't have any specific resources handy, unfortunately. Sorry. -- Paul

Replies

Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
R A Brown <ray@...>