Re: Why did Boustrophedon Disappear?

> 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

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