Re: Scripts

At 12:17 AM -0700 07/07/02, Barry Garcia wrote:
>CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
>>A few people have mentioned Devanagari so far, so i'd just like to
>>mention that until i met someone who's literate in Bengali (another Indic
>>script which i can't tell the difference between), i always assumed that
>>Devanagari and the similar-looking scripts with lines along their upper
>>edges go Right to Left.  But then i found out that they go Left to Right.
>>  Am i the only one who thinks that they look like they should be going
>>the opposite direction?
>
>I Never thought so, mostly because i hadn't learned that scripts could go
>right to left, until i learned about Hebrew and Arabic (and by then i had
>already learned how Devanagari goes). I can see why you might assume that.
>I wonder, had you learned how to write in Hebrew already by the time you
>saw Devanagari?
>
>To me at least, the way you start and end Devanagari Letters leads itself
>better to writing left to right, rather than right to left (they seem to
>end with the vertical lines on the right hand sides).
The printed versions of these scripts indicate that they are (or
were) written using pens with oblique nibs. The direction of the
slant it is exactly opposite of that seen in Roman based scripts; we
have it from top right to bottom left, whereas Devanagari has it from
top left to bottom right. I think that might  explain the
right-to-left look.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                  Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

Man deth swa he byth thonne he mot swa he wile.
'A man does as he is when he can do what he wants.'

- Old English Proverb