Re: Why did Boustrophedon Disappear?

Paul Kershaw wrote:
>> 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.
It was probably an important issue in the Greek change from the
right-to-left of the archaic Greek alphabets (8th cent. BCE) to the
familiar left-to-right which was AFAIK universal from the 5th cent. BCE
till the present day.

In the case of Greek, boustrophedon seems to have formed an intermediary
between the older and later writing directions. With Greek boustrophedon
the first and, therefore, all odd numbered lines were written
right-to-left while the even numbered lines went left-to-right.

> I wonder if boustrophedon is
> easier if you switch your writing instrument to the other hand when
> you change direction.
When writing with pen & ink, almost certainly, I would think. But all
the Greek boustrophedon that we have is inscribed on stone. I suspect it
is not such an issue there. Indeed, I would guess that boustrophedon
gave way to standard left-to-right as literacy became more widespread
and pen & ink was more widely used.

> 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 ;) ).
I'm told that right-handed people write Arabic in columns down the page
which, when the page is turned 90 degrees clockwise gives the standard
left-to-right cursive script. I don't know how true that is.

> Likewise, stonework and clay incisions in
> one direction may have wound being easier than bidirectionally.
I have seen it stated that right-handers, left-to-right is more natural
when using pen/brush and ink, but that right-to-left comes more
naturally when chiseling on stone. I'm a bit skeptical about this.

[snip]
>
> Many of the Latin letters are symmetrical, or symmetrical enough that
> they wouldn't require (much) extra learning:
Interesting observation. It is indeed claimed that the boustrophedon
period caused the ancient Greek letters to assume a more symmetrical
shape, e.g. Α, Δ, Η, Θ, Ι, Λ, Μ, Ξ, Ο, Π, Τ, Υ, Φ, Χ, Ψ, Ω. Also before
the left-to-right direction became general, zeta was normally written
like a sideways H (without serifs :)

That means that 17 of the 24 letters (71%) were perfectly symmetrical;
and the remainder wouldn't require much effort to reverse.

[snip]
> 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.
True. In the case of Greek boustrophedon there was a strictly observed
convention - see above.
-----------------------------------------

Philip Newton wrote:
 > 2009/3/30 Paul Kershaw <ptkershaw@...>:
 >> 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."
 >
 > The other way around, I think; I thought they always face you as you
 > come along the line in reading direction, i.e. they point to the start
 > of the line. But I could be misremembering.

No, you're not misremembering - it's Paul that misremembered: animal,
birds, humans etc face towards the beginning of the line.

 > In any case, your point stands that the direction in which certain
 > signs point can indicate the reading direction of the current line.

Quite so. Interestingly, however, although the Egyptian scribes write
either left-to-right or, more commonly, right-to-left or from
top-to-bottom, AFAIK boustrophedon was not used by them (nor bottom-to-top!)

--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
"Ein Kopf, der auf seine eigene Kosten denkt,
wird immer Eingriffe in die Sprache thun."
[J.G. Hamann, 1760]
"A mind that thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language".

--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
"Ein Kopf, der auf seine eigene Kosten denkt,
wird immer Eingriffe in die Sprache thun."
[J.G. Hamann, 1760]
"A mind that thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language".

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