The Mystery of Writing Direction

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Have you ever wondered why some cultures write from right to left, while others write from left to right? The mystery of this phenomenon has puzzled scholars for centuries, but one theory suggests that it may have to do with the materials that were available to a culture.
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traditionally chinese is written right to left in vertical columns written up to down, left to right was introduced in the late 19th century. the same is the case of Japanese and Korean.

yurashida
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I'm left handed and I can confirm, ink smears are a problem, so I don't use pens, just a hammer, a chisel and a stone tablet whenever I write a check.

Trekiros
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My Irish friend told me about Ogham which is the old writing system used for the Old Irish language, it's traditionally written bottom to top because that was the easiest way to carve it into trees, which was generally where it was written

NinjaLLR
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Some Sanskrit scriptures are written from left to right as well as right to left and if you read it from one direction it has different meaning from the other.

anisha
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And then there is me being left handed, screwing it all up.

materwelon
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This is what YouTube was made for, you're amazing.

Boritoman
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Chinese scripts are traditionally written top to bottom and then right to left. If a passage is needed to be written horizontally, it is still going from right to left. The reason for that is in the old days when words were written on bamboo strips, it was more convienient for a writer to place new strips from the left while still holding the brush with the right hand.

格維張
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You're partly correct...

Virtually every written language known to exist began for the purpose of keeping records - primarily through tally-marks, using crude pictograms as 'column headers' to indicate what good was being recorded. As record-keeping became more prominent, the pictograms became more stylized for both legibility and ease of use; thus becoming the basis for primitive alphabets.

Even with the advent of clay tablets (c 3500 BC), papyrus (c 2900 BC), parchment (c 500 BCE), and paper (c 25 AD), top-to-bottom retained its prominence in writing systems; even in horizontal systems, the lines of text are still written and read top-to-bottom.

~ Left-to-Right (c 3500 BCE)
The chief substance to write on, historically, is clay - various Cuneiform (literally "wedge shapes") systems arose in nearly all 'Ancient Cradles' like Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Indus Valley. Being river-based civilizations with plentiful access to silt- and clay-based soils, they all defaulted to clay as the primary substrate for record-keeping systems and (eventually) writing.


As most people are naturally right-handed, with a tendency to let their hand rest upon the writing surface for stability and precision, writers adopted a left-to-right methodology.

Bonus Fact: As the people *reading* the records were accustomed to reading top-to-bottom (while those *writing* them preferred left-to-right), recorders simply rotated the characters 90° as a compromise - this further divorced written characters from their pictographic origins.

~ Right-to-Left
In regions where clay was less plentiful, stone became the prominent writing material. Again, most people being right-handed played a critical role in writing orientation - while being able to better see their work was indeed a factor, the biggest influence was the potential for accidents.

A chief liability of stone is hidden fractures; when carving text into stone, it's common for small pieces to chip/flake off unintentionally. This is not a major issue if it happens to an area you haven't yet carved, but could be disastrous if it fractures an area where you've already spent a fair amount of time carving.

~ Top-to-Bottom
As some have pointed out, the written languages of East Asia (ie Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc) remain top-to-bottom - this, too, is due to their historical writing substrates. The most plentiful substrate available to these cultures was bamboo, which was readily harvested and flattened to produce narrow strips to write upon. While they did have access to clay and papyrus, these materials were far less plentiful and needed for other more essential purposes. For longer records/texts, multiple bamboo strips were sewn together to form early scrolls. (In more northern climes, the same pattern evolved using strips of wood and bone.)

By the time paper was invented, writing top-to-bottom was well entrenched and there was no impetus to change the orientation. It wasn't until interaction with Western civilizations (which exclusively wrote left-to-right) became prominent that these cultures even considered altering their writing systems.

twylanaythias
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As a language nerd I absolutely love that this popped up on my shorts, exactly what I want to see

meadow
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That’s actually correct, my friend. I am currently in classes for learning Hebrew and my teacher has been studying it for almost three decades. He explained that to me last year<3

MJ_The_Butterfly
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This brought up a random memory. In my junior high art class they would sit us 4 to a table. I was right handed, and placed at the left end of a table. To my immediate right was a boy who was left handed. Our elbows kept bumping while we would draw. One day we decided to just swap positions without consulting the teacher. She did a double take, but just laughed when we explained what we were doing.

TwilightMysts
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Japanese is written from up to down than right to left.
In order to avoid putting ink everywhere on the paper, but it's also because it was written using different materials than you find in Europe. You could easily make a paint brush and can get ink decently easily from squids/octopus. The only reason it is now written from left to write is because Japanese as a language had to adapt to modernisation. By writing from left to right, you can fit more text, adjust its size more easily and costumise it more. Which is why on the internet you're going to read Japanese like this
こんばんわ、あたしはフラワーです。
どうぞよろしく!
Rather than
どこ
うん
ぞば
よん
ろわ
し、
くあ
!た
 し
 わ 
 フ
 ラ
 ワ
 ー
 で
 す
 。
It would also be Awkward to animate, however, some apps like Ibis Paint X are capable of writing in traditional Japanese direction.

SourSalty
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I love being a left handed Arabic learner cuz I can finally experience not smudging everything

praupbskyhomk
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Chinese also write from right to left originally. They switched a couple of centuries ago when they started to westernize. In fact, they not only write in the opposite direction, they also write vertically, not horizontally. They write from top to bottom and moved to a column on the left when they reach the bottom of paper.

곰돌슨
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The Greeks wrote "as the ox plows" which was alternating left and right lines. They also wrote in circles, or interspersed text with drawings. As the various city-states developed their own styles, Athens simplified its writing into lines of left-right. When Athens became the most important cultural center, people wanted copies of the plays and essays written there, so that style became the norm.

andrewtime
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As a Mongolian, traditionally we write from up to down. Becuase of the gravitation, its the fastest way to write and on the horse back its the easiest.

Bla
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Chinese and Japanese are traditionally written vertically with new lines appearing right to left. Japanese newspapers and novels are typically still printed this way. In school we write written essays this way too.

We only type left to right because of early computer restrictions.

dono
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The person at the beginning just writes on Russian:
ru: "Время", eng: "Time" so elegant

inreck
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As an Arab I can confirm that we write on stone tablets

z_hammerman
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and also why Southeast Asian alphabets are curved and tends to swirls, bc the material we writing on were leaves, so the curved shapes prevents from breaking the leaves when we write on them.

kaptenkukang