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

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
  or horizontal lines. With few exceptions ("retrograde"), the
  direction of reading is toward the face of human or animal
  pictograms, i.e. the signs are turned toward the beginning of
  the inscriptions. Vertical columns are read from top to bottom,
  while horizonrtal texts may be oriented either from right to
  left or from left to reight. In practice, a distinct preference
  is shown for right-to-left orientation. Reversal of this norm
  is usually based on an artistic desire for symmetry (flanking
  inscriptions on doorways, etc., or to coordinate the text
  with a represented figure facing left (Fischer 1977, cols 1992-93).

On the whole I am of the opinion that the direction of writing is
always an historical artefact, and although it's an interesting
theory about vowelless scripts and direction of writing, I don't think
there's much in it. Even with scripts that show all vowels, most
accomplished readers read by the word or phrase, and not by the sign.

>
> 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. As for my own
scripts, I had designed whole families of scripts, alphabetic,
syllabic and ideographic, 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 ;-)!

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt