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Boustrophedon

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11–20 of 62 posts

Re: Boustrophedon

#11

What was the reason for writing this way on stone? It can't be to keep text aligned - you can just walk to the left and keep going, and the text will stay aligned just as well as if you'd been writing right-to-left.

What is the reason for writing always in the same direction?

I don't ask this as a joke: is there seriously a cognitive advantage to having to pass your eye all the way back to the beginning of the next line (whether you read right-left, left-right or top-bottom) vs immediately dropping down and continue reading?

On the other hand I spent a lot of time in high school and university reading pictures of boustrophedon greek texts and once you are used to it you don't even think of it. Likewise R-L texts -- my difficulty with handwritten arabic is the wide variation in characters; the directionality rapidly became automatic, even in mixed-language texts.

In the case of boustrophedon texts, a dominating factor is the sheer irregularity of character shapes (nothing was machine made) and worse, a lot of the black and white photos in books are old, crummy ones which make the deciphering even more "interesting". And this was all before the development of spaces between the words too, and at a time when character shapes were evolving.

Regardless, all written languages I know of (even counting Korean, which is slightly different in-word), seem to have picked a single direction as a dominant, and even before the development of mechanised writing (which would make the characters extremely regular, which might drive a tend to optimize). So there could be some cognitive benefit. I could imagine there's an advantage in that you could train a NN in your visual system to recognize regularly-shaped characters and do look-ahead, but I have seen no studies of it.

Re: Boustrophedon

#12
post #6

I can see an advantage to having the beginning of the next line immediately beneath the end of the previous line -- it avoids a greater refocus adjustment distance to start new lines. This would greatly reduce mistakes where the nth or (n+2)th line is started by mistake instead of the (n+1)th. However, I don't immediately see an advantage to flipping the letters across the vertical axis for each new line.

A sibling comment suggests that it's to help encode the direction, but I wonder if there's a less intentional reason, which is: why not mirror the letters? If I were coming up with conventions for reading and writing for the first time or possibly based on descriptions that some sailor had reported, it's not obvious to me that the direction of the letter should matter, especially if the letters you are using aren't mirror symmetric with other letters (lower case wasn't invented until ~1,000 years after the Hellenistic period, when boustrophedon fell out of favor).

Re: Boustrophedon

#14
post #7

With enough practice, I could see this being much easier to read. There's no jumping from the end of one line and searching for the next, plus each line is visually distinct from the ones immediately above and below. I wonder how much text I would have to read like this before it felt natural?

> I wonder how much text I would have to read like this before it felt natural?

If you see my note above I mention that it wasn't a big deal. More to your question, frankly learning ancient Greek grammar was far more painful -- the effort to learn to parse old inscriptions was in the noise compared to the effort to understand what the hell they were writing.

Re: Boustrophedon

#15
post #11

What was the reason for writing this way on stone? It can't be to keep text aligned - you can just walk to the left and keep going, and the text will stay aligned just as well as if you'd been writing right-to-left.

What is the reason for writing always in the same direction? I don't ask this as a joke: is there seriously a cognitive advantage to having to pass your eye all the way back to the beginning of the next line (whether you read right-left, left-right or top-bottom) vs immediately dropping down and continue reading? On the other hand I spent a lot of time in high school and university reading pictures of boustrophedon g…

I wonder if the standardization of directions, rather than boustrophedonic writing, is due to the technology of paper and ink. If you're carving into stone or clay, then your hand isn't as likely to smudge the already written text.

Re: Boustrophedon

#16
post #11

What was the reason for writing this way on stone? It can't be to keep text aligned - you can just walk to the left and keep going, and the text will stay aligned just as well as if you'd been writing right-to-left.

What is the reason for writing always in the same direction? I don't ask this as a joke: is there seriously a cognitive advantage to having to pass your eye all the way back to the beginning of the next line (whether you read right-left, left-right or top-bottom) vs immediately dropping down and continue reading? On the other hand I spent a lot of time in high school and university reading pictures of boustrophedon g…

Boustrephodon works very well for _words_ -- but badly for numbers. Even Roman-style ones. I suspect that put it at a disadvantage.

Re: Boustrophedon

#17
post #11

What was the reason for writing this way on stone? It can't be to keep text aligned - you can just walk to the left and keep going, and the text will stay aligned just as well as if you'd been writing right-to-left.

What is the reason for writing always in the same direction? I don't ask this as a joke: is there seriously a cognitive advantage to having to pass your eye all the way back to the beginning of the next line (whether you read right-left, left-right or top-bottom) vs immediately dropping down and continue reading? On the other hand I spent a lot of time in high school and university reading pictures of boustrophedon g…

Double the characters to recognize; double the heuristics to internalize for rapid reading.

No idea what the relative cost of those are but I'd wager it exceeds the mechanical cost of scanning back to the "front" of the line...

Re: Boustrophedon

#18
post #11

What was the reason for writing this way on stone? It can't be to keep text aligned - you can just walk to the left and keep going, and the text will stay aligned just as well as if you'd been writing right-to-left.

What is the reason for writing always in the same direction? I don't ask this as a joke: is there seriously a cognitive advantage to having to pass your eye all the way back to the beginning of the next line (whether you read right-left, left-right or top-bottom) vs immediately dropping down and continue reading? On the other hand I spent a lot of time in high school and university reading pictures of boustrophedon g…

But there is also the disavantage of going back to the beginning of the page and losing your line. Happens to me too frequently to be annoying (while reading left-tp-right and top-to-bottom languages).

Re: Boustrophedon

#19
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the reason for writing always in the same direction? I don't ask this as a joke: is there seriously a cognitive advantage to having to pass your eye all the way back to the beginning of the next line (whether you read right-left, left-right or top-bottom) vs immediately dropping down and continue reading? On the other hand I spent a lot of time in high school and university reading pictures of boustrophedon g…

Double the characters to recognize; double the heuristics to internalize for rapid reading. No idea what the relative cost of those are but I'd wager it exceeds the mechanical cost of scanning back to the "front" of the line...

[deleted]

Re: Boustrophedon

#20
post #16
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the reason for writing always in the same direction? I don't ask this as a joke: is there seriously a cognitive advantage to having to pass your eye all the way back to the beginning of the next line (whether you read right-left, left-right or top-bottom) vs immediately dropping down and continue reading? On the other hand I spent a lot of time in high school and university reading pictures of boustrophedon g…

Boustrephodon works very well for _words_ -- but badly for numbers. Even Roman-style ones. I suspect that put it at a disadvantage.

IN the days when people used boustrophedon there were not separate glyphs for numbers and even positional number orientation wasn't especially common.

As it happens the big-endian notation of hindu (aka "arabic" in English) numbers is kind of a botch in L-R languages since you have to parse the entire goddamned thing to learn anything about it (and when it's long you have to parse it r-l anyway y divided sections). At least in R-L writing you can get evenness immediately.

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