Re: boustrophedon (was: Atlantis II)

On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, Andreas Johansson wrote:

> John Cowan wrote:
> >Dan Seriff scripsit:
> >
> > > Apparently there are none. It appears that Greek boustropedon was
> > > realized in those two ways, which can be called inverted and
> > > non-inverted. This is from the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing
> >Systems.
> >
> >IIRC, the boustrophedoid style of rongo-rongo is every other line upside
> >down: rather than writing backward along the alternate lines, the whole
> >writing surface (a tablet) was turned over in the hand.
>
> Did they, by chance, tend to do likewise when the read the texts? Just
> curious ...
Maybe it differed depending on whether it was a man or a woman doing the
reading.  :-p  In _Why Men Don't Talk and Women Can't Read Maps_ (or
v.v.?) the authors tell us, among many things both
not-really-substantiated and somewhat-siubstantiated, that women don't
have a part of the brain for rotating maps mentally (I kid you not,
that's almost exactly their wording), hence must turn maps around.
Perhaps the same would apply to boustrophedoid scripts?

As far as maps go, I often but not always turn them around.  My
boyfriend due to Boy Scout training always turns them around.  ^_^  And
when shuffling cards from collectible card games, or otherwise
manipulating  such a deck *(i.e. not symmetric up-and-down-wise), I
insist on turning the cards "right-side up" because I hate having to
switch from reading right-side-up or upside-down, whereas my male friends
don't seem to care.  (I can't remember what the other female ccg player
did with her cards, and I am thankfully no longer in contact with her for
reasons that have nothing to do with cards.)

YHL

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