"Latin letters do not hold hands. Arabic letters do.
To understand why every machine since Gutenberg has wrestled this script and mostly lost, you need one structural fact: Arabic is cursive always."
This piece is an exhilarating, eye-opening, outrageous, and very funny tale of the difference between latin letters and Arabic letters, and why printing presses and screen renderers have such a hard time with it.
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Deborah Preuss, pcc
in reply to CelloMom On Cars • • •#TIL
"… languages were written on a tablet of stone using a chisel. Since most people are naturally right-handed, they would hold a hammer with the right hand and a chisel with the left. … That’s why you find most older languages (such as Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi) written from right to left.
When ink was invented, … writing from left to right became more preferable in many parts of the world since this method avoided smudging ink."
Source: writingbeginner.com/are-arabic…
Are Arabic Writers Left-Handed? (Solved) | Writing Beginner
christopherkokoski (Writing Beginner)Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Deborah Preuss, pcc • •@Deborah Preuss, pcc that phrase feels off
the oldest writing system, cuneiform, was written first and foremost by pressing a stylus on clay, with carving in stone reserved for exceptionally important documents.
Hieroglyphs followed soon afterwards, and indeed some of the earliest examples are carved in stone, but they are also small bits of text in the middle of a decorative design, and there are also similar examples that are painted on pottery, which would only require one hand.
Chinese oracle bone script were, like the name says, carved in softer material (bone).
And I don't know whether we know on what surface Maya script started, and I suspect that if it was done on perishable materials we'll never know, because the climate there is quite different from that of Egypt.
And the direction of writing of those early examples varied wildly, even in the same script, with left to right, right to left, top to bottom and even boustrophedon.
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CelloMom On Cars
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •@valhalla @deborahh
The Sumerians, then the Egyptians, but it's the Phoenicians or the Etruscans who first had an alphabet* as we know it, and they wrote right to left. Then the Greeks adopted the letters but wrote them backwards, left to right.
superprof.com/blog/why-are-sem…
Romans (much later) also wrote on wax tablets for everyday notes. I mean, who had time to carve everything in stone?
*The word 'alphabet' is from their first two letters, aleph or alif (cow), and beth (house)
Why Is Arabic Written from Right to Left? History & Reasons
www.superprof.comElena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to CelloMom On Cars • •@CelloMom On Cars @Deborah Preuss, pcc afaik the proto-sinaitic script was still written in both directions (including changing direction on alternate lines), and so were the early greek and italic (including etruscan) texts, settling on a standard direction happened a bit later, and it ended up being the opposite direction between Semitic languages and Greek + the linguistic mess that was Italy.
I'm not sure whether there has been any research on why it happened this way, or if it was a random chance (which sounds pretty likely, considering that the writing mediums were pretty similar in both places).
boustrophedic and right-to-left inscriptions from the pre-roman iron age are quite common in the museums of northern Italy, even if the alphabet they were using was definitely derived from the Greek one (probably after going through the Etruscans, as they were the local prestige civilization at the time)
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CelloMom On Cars
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •@valhalla @deborahh
In both directions on alternate lines!
It shows you there's more than one way to skin this cat.
Also, seems there was a lot of experimentation going on before somebody banged on the table and prescribed a standard.
Elena ``of Valhalla''
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Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to CelloMom On Cars • •@CelloMom On Cars @Deborah Preuss, pcc also, wikipedia tells me that the oldest find of a probably-wax-tablet was in a shipwreck of the coast of contemporary Turkey from the 14th century BC, which is pretty cool!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uluburun…
(probably. after a few millennia in the sea I think there was no wax left on the tablet, and I have no access to the article to read the details and see how confident they are that it was actually one)
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Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to CelloMom On Cars • •@CelloMom On Cars TIL that the harfbuzz name comes from arabic, thanks!
(I knew of it from the fact that's optionally used by fpdf2, that I maintain in Debian)
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