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Boustrophedon

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Re: Boustrophedon

#31

Post by Grustaf »

aaroninsf wrote: post #17
gumby wrote: 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...

A mirrored letter still looks very similar. Most people learn the letter topologies first, and only later pin down the chirality. Just think of all the mirrored N's you probably used to write!

So it's definitely not twice as much work, I'd say it's not more work at all, you basically just don't worry about the chirality and that's it.

Re: Boustrophedon

#32

Post by Grustaf »

rflrob wrote: post #12
kjhughes wrote: 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 m…

Exactly. And I think the idea to encode direction is a bit anachronistic, in those days they didn't even use punctuation or spaces so it was pretty hard to read anyway, you'd have to do a lot of thinking. And of course with Semitic writing you didn't even encode the vowel sounds.

In hieroglyphic inscriptions the animals etc do face the direction of reading (which varies), but I'm not sure this was in order to help people read it easier.

Re: Boustrophedon

#33

Post by kjhughes »

morsch wrote: post #27
kjhughes wrote: 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.

I found it surprisingly easy to read the mirrored examples in the article. I think it may be more comfortable -- after a while, at least -- to read the mirrored letters; because we don't read letter-by-letter anyway and the "word image" is intact (just mirrored). Here's the example image (with mirrored letters): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon#/media/File:Bous... And here's a non-mirrored version: THIS EX…

You raise a good point in that we don't read letter-by-letter anyway. So, this variant, which leverages recognition of whole words at a time, would have the line tracking advantage of Boustrophedon without the problem of duplicating letters for forward and reverse directions:

  THIS EXAMPLE OF BOUSTROPHEDON TEXT WAS
  WIKIPEDIA THE FOR SPECIFICALLY WRITTEN
  ARTICLE  ON  THIS OX TURNING METHOD OF
  ANCIENT  IN TEXT WITH WALL A COVERING
  GREECE AND ELSEWHERE

Re: Boustrophedon

#34

Post by panglott »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #3

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.

Writing involves a couple of different metaphors; the main one is the correspondence of a written symbol with an oralsound. Another one is that a linear sequence of glyphs matches a linear sequence of sounds. Obviously there are mechanical problems with fitting a long sequence of letters on a limited space. Boustephedron maintains the linear sequence of the letters by going back and forth. People quickly learned that it's much easier to read if you instead cut each line into segments and start each segment on one side of a page, but this breaks the visual metaphor of a continuous line of written symbols matching a continuous line of sounds.

Inventing writing is really, really, really hard. Just as, given that we learned to read so long ago, it's hard to remember how hard it is to learn to read. Boustephedron is like training wheels for writing.

Re: Boustrophedon

#36

Post by jagger27 »

My Latin 101 prof used to go through the rows of seats in boustrophedon order, his words, to read passages from Wheelock. Don't miss that class very much.

Re: Boustrophedon

#37

Post by gumby »

Grustaf wrote: post #30
gumby wrote: 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…

>So there could be some cognitive benefit This is only really the case for phonetic writing where you learn to recognise the shape of groups of letters (this is how you are reading this text). For logographic/pictographic writing it is much less of a benefit. And as I wrote above, even for alphabetic writing like Greek it doesn't really matter if all you read is the occasional monumental inscription.

I assume you meant to write "alphabetic" rather than "phonetic" since many languages that use alphabets use them in a way only loosely tied to sound (which you allude to by talking about reading in chunks of grapheme clusters). Korean is a notable exception but I'd bet most readers don't parse the sound either.

Re: Boustrophedon

#38

Post by singingboyo »

kjhughes wrote: post #33
morsch wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it surprisingly easy to read the mirrored examples in the article. I think it may be more comfortable -- after a while, at least -- to read the mirrored letters; because we don't read letter-by-letter anyway and the "word image" is intact (just mirrored). Here's the example image (with mirrored letters): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon#/media/File:Bous... And here's a non-mirrored version: THIS EX…

You raise a good point in that we don't read letter-by-letter anyway. So, this variant, which leverages recognition of whole words at a time, would have the line tracking advantage of Boustrophedon without the problem of duplicating letters for forward and reverse directions: THIS EXAMPLE OF BOUSTROPHEDON TEXT WAS WIKIPEDIA THE FOR SPECIFICALLY WRITTEN ARTICLE ON THIS OX TURNING METHOD OF ANCIENT IN TEXT WITH WALL A…

While we don't read letter by letter, this does still require some left-right scanning for longer words. In texts (or languages - German?) with many long words, this would be an issue.

The initial method seems to do the best job of not triggering the part of my brain that wants to read normally - which is a benefit, as I can then use a specific reading method for boustrophedon text, rather than fighting against my initial reactions.

Re: Boustrophedon

#39

Post by timthelion »

gnicholas wrote: post #10
kjhughes wrote: 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.

If you're interested in this concept, you might try BeeLine Reader, which uses line-wrapping color gradients to avoid the line transition errors you describe (and doesn't involve letter flipping). Disclosure: I am the founder! http://www.beelinereader.com

Please add real Boustrophedon! I'm so interested in what it is like to read longer documents like this.

Re: Boustrophedon

#40

Post by gnicholas »

timthelion wrote: post #39
gnicholas wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're interested in this concept, you might try BeeLine Reader, which uses line-wrapping color gradients to avoid the line transition errors you describe (and doesn't involve letter flipping). Disclosure: I am the founder! http://www.beelinereader.com

Please add real Boustrophedon! I'm so interested in what it is like to read longer documents like this.

Wait seriously? So Boustrophedon, with color gradients to pull you down in the right direction? I'll have to play with this (and vanilla Boustrophedon) a bit to see if we want to offer it. Thanks for checking us out, and for the suggestion!
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