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Boustrophedon

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Re: Boustrophedon

#21

Post by pavel_lishin »

gumby wrote: post #11
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.

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…

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

Only about half the glyphs to recognize. Being able to skip further down the "page" and trivially continue reading. Being able to rapidly scan a line of text.

I guess this is all predicated on a mostly literate populace with a lot of reading material. You probably don't need to rapidly scan a wall carving extolling the virtues of your God-Emperor and recording all of his battle victories, unless you're trying to win a bar-bet. ("I'm telling you, he beheaded TWELVE infidels with a single swing!" "Yeah, well, find it on the wall and I'll buy you a beer.")

Re: Boustrophedon

#22

Post by mkohler »

I first encountered the word in the excellent book, Expert C Programming, by Peter van der Linden, who explained that declarations in C are read boustrophedonically.

Re: Boustrophedon

#23

Post by 482794793792894 »

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.

In our system, it becomes challenging to find the start of the next line when reading long lines of text. This is pretty much the main reason why sheets of paper or modern webpages are only as wide as they are.

Re: Boustrophedon

#24

Post by gumby »

rflrob wrote: post #15
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…

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.

I used to think that, but a bit of reflection puts that to bed:

1 - The earliest ink-and-paper writing in the Middle East was in Egypt, where the pen writing mostly followed inscription, being a little free form in ordering. AFAIK the old language didn't acquire an alphabetic system until Greek colonization (cf Coptic, which is (evolved) pharaonic Egyptian written with essentially Greek characters). That latter is indeed a L-R system, but has been largely replaced with the R-L Arabic.

2 - Your hand is likely to smudge R-L systems unless you're left handed which most people are not.

3 - The other in-and-paper system, Chinese, until recently (couple of hundred years ago) used only brushes, not pens, so smudging was a non-issue. Top-bottom though could be attested in this way; it's better to draw the brush rather than push it, so starting at the top of the page makes sense, but why R-L vs L-R...?

I don't know about the the third independent site of the development of writing, the Americas, as the jesuits burned almost 100% of the books, and so mostly we only have monumental writing, which doesn't address this question.

AFAIK all the indigenous Alphabets of India are L-R (Urdu is R-L due to its use of an arabic alphabet)

Re: Boustrophedon

#25

Post by morsch »

mkohler wrote: post #22

I first encountered the word in the excellent book, Expert C Programming, by Peter van der Linden, who explained that declarations in C are read boustrophedonically.

In C++, on the other hand, they're read stroustruphedonically.

Re: Boustrophedon

#26

Post by 482794793792894 »

chaosmachine wrote: post #8
cattleprodigy wrote: post #5

http://boustro.com/app

It's surprisingly difficult to stop my eyes from snapping back to the left side after each line.

I also find that my brain wrongly pattern-matches words that form a different word when reading the letters in reverse.

So, I for example often misread "was" as "saw" or "on" as "no".

Re: Boustrophedon

#27

Post by morsch »

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 EXAMPLE OF BOUSTROPHEDON TEXT WAS
  AIDEPIKIW EHT ROF YLLACIFICEPS NETTIRW
  ARTICLE  ON  THIS OX TURNING METHOD OF
  TNEICNA  NI TXET HTIW LLAW A GNIREVOC
  GREECE AND ELSEWHERE

Re: Boustrophedon

#28

Post by Grustaf »

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.

Early writing wasn't as standardised as it is now, and most reading would be done aloud in more or less formal circumstances, so the maximum efficiency we strive for today was probably not a consideration.

And since writing on stone is a pretty cumbersome activity it was probably natural to continue writing next to where you just finished a symbol.

Note that cuneiform (which of course predates Greek by a wide margin), written on clay with a reed, was not written boustrophedon.

On the other hand, Egyptian hieroglyphics, though carved in stone, weren't either - instead they were very flexible on writing direction.

I suppose my only real point is that the Ancients didn't see a great need for a fixed writing direction.

Re: Boustrophedon

#29

Post by gumby »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #21
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…

> What is the reason for writing always in the same direction? Only about half the glyphs to recognize. Being able to skip further down the "page" and trivially continue reading. Being able to rapidly scan a line of text. I guess this is all predicated on a mostly literate populace with a lot of reading material. You probably don't need to rapidly scan a wall carving extolling the virtues of your God-Emperor and reco…

> Only about half the glyphs to recognize.

This is not really a big deal. Some writing systems require you to recognize a few thousand symbols, and I read (i.e. "effortlessly recognise") three alphabets and with some concentration two more (the grammar is a bigger deal for the latter...my overall fluency in those languages is, at best, poor and I am sure will never get better. But symbol recognition is not the barrier).

This is because I put in the effort to study these languages, but many people, without much formal education, can read that number of alphabets (much better than I can) simply because they live in (typically border) regions where that is reality of daily life. My own mother grew up in a town where four writing systems were in use, plus used a different alphabet in her home.

Don't mock that older writing by the way. Most people were illiterate; Especially anything in paper was the writing of some pretty sophisticated folks.

Re: Boustrophedon

#30

Post by Grustaf »

gumby wrote: post #11
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.

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.

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