We are always writing and trying to present you interesting articles about terminology, translation, and linguistics in general. When writing my last article, I wondered how I write and how my text reaches you. So today I would like to talk a bit about epigraphy, calligraphy and more particularly, about stoichedon. Epigraphy is the science which studies ancient inscriptions used to communicate, and calligraphy means “decorative handwriting or handwritten lettering” [2]. For its part, stoichedon is the practice of engraving inscriptions following a specific alignment, e.g. left-to-right, or vertical-horizontal. One of the most famous epigraphs in the world is the Rosetta Stone, on display in the British Museum, which has a special meaning for those interested in linguistics, as it has three codes engraved on it: Greek, Demotic and Hieroglyphic; that is a language written from left to right, another from right-to-left, and a third one using logograms or logographs – signs that represent a word or a sentence. But why are languages written horizontally and not vertically?
Languages like English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian…, i.e. Indo-European languages, are written and read from left-to-right simply because they come from Latin and Greek. However, Greek used to be written from right to left, just like Phoenician. Some people say that the main reason for selecting this direction when writing is due to the fact that there are more right-handed people, or because it avoids soiling the paper with ink. In any case, there are many other languages that are not traditionally written this way, the Arabic language being one of the most famous examples. Arabic, just like Persian or Hebrew, is written and read right-to-left.
Those are all languages written in a horizontal direction, but there are also languages which preferred a vertical presentation. That is the case of Chinese, Japanese or Korean, which recently started to use or combine horizontal left-to-right, but which traditionally used the zongpai alignment, meaning ‘vertical alignment’. In China, traditional vertical writing started to be combined with horizontal writing at the beginning of the 1950s, while Korean introduced it during the 80s and 90s. The truth is that English, like any other left-to-right language, may use vertical writing; however it is usually related to a very specific situation, fixed by the context (e.g. marketing, space…). Actually, languages like Chinese are languages based on ideograms, characters “symbolizing the idea of a thing without indicating the sounds used to say it” [3].
There are other kind of ideograms or logograms: hieroglyphics. Curiously two of the most famous hieroglyphics were used in very distant regions: Africa (Egyptian hieroglyphs) and America (Maya script). Maya people normally wrote from left to right [5], while the Egyptian code might appear both from right to left or left to right, depending on the direction of the eyes and birds [4] used in the text. That means that signs do not necessarily have a fixed form that distinguishes one from another (for example, in English letters b and d have their distinctive form, independently of the writing direction). Libyco-Berber inscriptions, used throughout centuries in the Sahara desert, from Siwa Oasis, Egypt, to the Canary Islands, has many letters that are written differently depending on the writing direction, a very common way being from bottom to top [6].
This is a very interesting piece of information to
take into account when decoding ancient texts.
Following on from the epigraphic examples, we want to mention the Code of Gortyn (detail picture above). Written in the Dorian dialect, the Code of Gortyn contains the civil law of the city of Gortyn (southern Crete). Its most representative characteristic is the use of boustrophedon technique, as it changes the direction of writing in every line, having one left-to-right line and the next one, right-to-left. The term ‘boustrophedon’ is a composed word that comes from Greek meaning ‘ox’ and ‘turn’, because this way of writing is similar to the direction followed when ploughing the field. This technique may remind us of the mirror writing: how we can play with letters, but still communicate. The mirror writing consists in writing the letters in the direction that is in reverse of the natural way for a given language, especially to avoid others to understand the text. But not only for that, as this is a technique also used on ambulances for instance.
Those are some facts related to natural writing, but what about social media? Of course, web sites and applications follow the direction used by the given language. However, the direction of the content is not always the same: some microblogs, like Twitter of Facebook, put the newest information on the top of the page, while online chats, like WhatsApp, Facebook Chat or Telegram, prefer to put it at the bottom. Other web sites provide their information in text boxes that are updated appearing from right to left. This could be related to marketing techniques where the position within the document is crucial. Therefore advertisements in western magazines tend to appear on odd pages, as this is what our eyes see first. Besides, we have many different types of letters to be used when writing in different languages, just to add extra information, as some fonts are associated with curriculum vitae, others with kids, for example.
Indeed, visual information has a strong power of communication. According to an oriental saying, “the human beauty lies in the beauty of their writing” [1], so writing also transmits a part of our culture and our vision of life. But also “beauty lies in the eyes of beholder”, so what do you think about writing types, methods and traditions?
Written by Ana Bennasar
Terminology trainee at TermCoord
Sources:
[1] Bulat, A.: “The Art of Calligraphy – 40 Free Fonts for Creative Writing”.
– HistoryofInformation.com: The Law Code of Gortyn, Crete: The Longest Extant Ancient Greek Stone Inscription in Greece.
[2] Oxford Dictionaries: Calligraphy.
[3] Oxford Dictionaries: Ideogram.
– Oxford Dictionaries: Logogram.
– Wikipedia: Boustrophedon.
[4] Wikipedia: Egyptian hieroglyphs.
– Wikipedia: Epigraphy.
– Wikipedia: Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts.
[5] Wikipedia: Maya script.
– Wikipedia: Mirror writing.
– Wikipedia: Right-to-left.
– Wikipedia: Rosetta Stone.
– Wikipedia: Stoichedon.
[6] Wikipedia: Tifinagh.