Re: Boustrophedon and Chinese Re: A single font can display ANY alphabet, pictograph

Kit La Touche wrote:
> to the best of my knowledge, most boustrephodon (to answer your spelling
> question)
It is spelled _boustrophedon_ just as Tom wrote it. The word is an
ancient Greek adverb, meaning "turning like an ox in ploughing/plowing"
<-- bou- "ox" + strophe "turning, twist".

> systems just go back and forth, like an ox plowing a field
> (the origin of the name), and usually exist in a language without much
> formal literature, and therefore are irregular in their starting
> position.
It existed in Greek, hence the origin of the term, and it was _not_
irregular in its starting. The first line & all odd numbered lines went
from right to left & the even numbered lines from left to right.

The Phoenician alphabet was used for writing Greek from about the 10th
cent BCE and ran, just like Hebrew & Arabic, from right to left. Then
from the 8th cent BCE IIRC boustrophedonic inscriptions become common,
giving way gradually to the later completely left to right direction,
still used in Greek and by Greek-derived alphabets like Roman & Cyrillic.

Boustrophedonic writing survived at least till the 5th cent BCE, which
is well into the literary period.

The term, it is true, is often applied to other scripts in which the
direction of writing changes; but these were not necessarily in the old
Greek manner. The ancient language (Rongorongo) of Easter Island is
written in alternate lines was rotated 180 degrees, not mirrored.


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Ray
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