Re: The write direction (was: Interesting Brain/Language Nugget of Info)

At 7:42 pm +0200 26/6/99, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>On Sat, 26 Jun 1999, Raymond A. Brown wrote:
>
>>
>> Do we have any Egyptologists on the list who can help us?
>>
>
>I'm not an Egyptologist (although I've worked my way faithfully through
>Gardiner - and I've read and enjoyed Loprieno's _Ancient Egyptian_),
>so this information comes straight from Daniels' _Writing Systems of
>the World_, page 80:
>
>  Hieroglyphic texts are composed in either vertical columns
[etc. snipped]

Yes, it confirms what I said. But I'd sure like to know about those
vertical lines. Were they usually left to right or vice versa?  If the
former, then it's easy to see why the right to left direction was favored
when the lines were were horizontally.

>
>On the whole I am of the opinion that the direction of writing is
>always an historical artefact,
That does seem to me to be so.

>and although it's an interesting
>theory about vowelless scripts and direction of writing, I don't think
>there's much in it.
IMO the evidence is too weak.  Practically all the vowelless scripts belong
to one group: the Semitic scripts.  The only other vowelless scripts I know
of (apart from some modern shorthands) are the ancient Egyptians ones & the
hieratic & demotic are also RTL.  But I'm of the opinion that these are
ultimately related to the Semitic scripts.  The theory would stand up
better if examples of vowelless scripts from other parts of the world were
attested & they all adopted the RTL direction.

As for vowelled scripts being LTR, they simply are not.

>Even with scripts that show all vowels, most
>accomplished readers read by the word or phrase, and not by the sign.
Yes, indeed.  And in this respect Yuen Ren Chao makes the interesting
observation:
"One does to be sure take in English by words and sentences in one glance
too, but since there is less individuality in the shapes of letters. the
words do not stand out as prominently as in a text of Chinese characters.
In looking for something in a page of English you have to look for _it_,
but in doing the same on a page of characters the thing looked for, if it
is on the page, will stare _you_ in the face."

Elsewhere in the same book (Language and Symbolic Systems), he says:
"I often speculate whether an ideal writing system would not be some golden
mean between the unwieldy thousands of arbitrary units and the paltry few
letters of the Latin alphabet.  To make a wild guess at the optimum number
of symbols, if we take say the geometric mean between the number of letters
of the Latin alphabet and the number of one of the sets of basic characters
of 1000 or 1100, it will come out to a list of roughly 170 symbols, which
seems to be a list of manageable size."

>>
>> Hope this has at least given ideas for con-scripts & con-script
>>histories  :-)
>>
>
>I am particularly fond of scripts and it has always annoyed me that
>the scripts are so little studied academically - it has taken years
>since Jensen to appear anything modern, like Daniels.
I agree.

>As for my own
>scripts, I had designed whole families of scripts, alphabetic,
>syllabic and ideographic,
Never done that much - but I did design my first one when I was 10.  It was
inspired by my seeing some Arabic script.  I hadn't a clue how that script
worked or what the symbols meant - but it looked nice.  I devised some
scheme for writing English so that each word formed a single compound
character.  I've done a few others since, but never tried an ideographic
one.

>but then I came upon the chancery script,
>and, like the Charyans who developed it, I liked it so much that all
>the other scripts fell out of use ;-)!
The Korean is still, I think, my favorite.

Ray.