Summer 2015 Intern
Can you imagine trying to use your favorite social media
site—or any website, really—with all of the text flowing in the opposite direction?
,siht ekil leef dluow tI and it would make said website very cumbersome to
interact with. This was the reality that Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu
speakers were stuck with until as recently as 2013
for Facebook and 2012
for Twitter.
With most of the world’s languages moving left-to-right,
sometimes it feels like the internet isn’t built for those people whose first languages
flow in other directions. Think about it: until just three years ago, if a
Hebrew Twitter user wanted to use a hashtag, he or she would essentially have
to tweet in reverse. Same thing for anyone trying to update a Facebook status.
Was that backwards sentence in the first paragraph annoying to try and
decipher? Imagine dealing with those kinds of sentences every time you wanted
to check out your newsfeed.
Not everyone is bothered by words flowing in other
directions, though. For instance, some three- and four-year-old children switch
the direction in which they write on a line-by-line
basis; they’ll start left-to-right like we’re used to, then follow that up
by going right-to-left on the next line. If you saw your child do this, you
would probably think it was the cute mistake of someone who hasn’t yet learned
how to properly form sentences. Instead, you might want to check and see if
your little toddler has secretly been studying ancient Greek; this alternating
method of writing is called boustrophedon
and was popular all the way back in the sixth century BCE. It makes sense when
you think about it: if you hadn’t been taught to write in a certain direction,
it would probably feel more natural to simply drop straight down to the next
line instead of picking your hand up and going back to where you started.
Toddlers clearly value efficiency over conforming to adults’ silly,
time-wasting writing methods.
The way our words move affects more than just our
ability to understand each other. Apparently, it can also shape our perception
of time. In an experiment conducted at Stanford University, participants were
asked to order four cards depicting the same event at different stages. Researchers
found that the direction that participants’ language moved matched
their perception of time: Native English speakers organized the cards from
left to right, Hebrew speakers organized them right to left and Mandarin speakers
sorted them vertically. (Traditionally, Chinese characters run top to bottom.)
My next question is this: If the results of this study are accurate, what do
they imply about the perception of time for boustrophedonically inclined
toddlers?
Did You Know?
If you find boustrophedonic writing to be somewhat
overwhelming, you would have absolutely hated life amongst the Easter Island
natives. They wrote in a language called Rongorongo and employed the world’s
only known practical use of reverse
boustrophedon, which follows the same zigzag pattern of boustrophedon—but
with the added headache of having
the text rotate 180 degrees for each line.
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