Why do they write from R to L in Arabic countries?

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Arabic script is written from right to left, which can be challenging for right-handed individuals, but Arabic speakers adapt from a young age, making it easier for them. The historical reasons for this writing direction may relate to the influence of Hebrew and the practicality of right-handed writing techniques. Discussions also touch on the prevalence of left-handedness in Arabic cultures, where left-handed individuals are often encouraged to write with their right hand. The evolution of writing systems, including boustrophedon styles, suggests that early writing practices influenced modern conventions. Overall, the direction of writing in Arabic is rooted in historical, cultural, and practical factors.
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It's a lot harder for right handed people to write R to L than L to R. So why do they write R to L? Are there more left-handed people in Arabic countries? Or was it a left-handed guy that invented writing down there?

Also, who were the first to start writing, and was it R to L or L to R?

http://www.audienceoftwo.com/pics/upload/obamalefty

Here are some more famous left handed people.
 
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You're not supposed to write left handed in arabic countries. If you're a lefty they force you to learn to write using your right hand. You left hand is supposed to be used to wipe your backside. You don't shake with it either.

Asians write up and down- diplomats.


I'm a lefty. Politically and how I write!
 
It probably seems harder to you, because it is the opposite of what you're used to. Arabic children learn from an early age to write right to left, so they are used to it and thus find it easier, just as left handed people in the western world can write left to write. Although, I'm not bad at "mirror writing" and I'm left handed so it is probably easier for the left handed Arabian folks.

I'm not sure why they write right to left either.

EDIT: I'd love to know how many left handed presisdents there have been
 
joeyar said:
It probably seems harder to you, because it is the opposite of what you're used to.

No, it is objectively harder to push a pen than pull it across the paper. I write with my left hand and my hand is always smudged and stuff. Not cool.
 
joeyar said:
It probably seems harder to you, because it is the opposite of what you're used to. Arabic children learn from an early age to write right to left, so they are used to it and thus find it easier, just as left handed people in the western world can write left to write. Although, I'm not bad at "mirror writing" and I'm left handed so it is probably easier for the left handed Arabian folks.

I'm not sure why they write right to left either.

I'm left handed, and I find it hard to write L to R. The edge of the hand works like a brake.
 
joeyar said:
EDIT: I'd love to know how many left handed presisdents there have been

James A. Garfield
Herbert Hoover
Harry S. Truman
Gerald Ford
Ronald Reagan
George Bush
Bill Clinton
Obama

8/44 = 18%, a lot more than average (7-10%). Maybe left handed people in general ARE gifted?

I want a poll in this thread: "Are you R or L handed?". How do I do that?
 
I've learned to hold my left wrist up with my right hand while using my right forearm to hold down the paper. And thanks for answering that question, yeah I do think left handed people are more gifted.

You can try editing your opening post of the thread, it may or may not work becuase the thread is so advanced, but if it does work, down the bottom should be some poll options.
 
why would you base your decision on gifted by presidency of the US?
 
why do people in some places write left to right is just as valid a question.

I'm a righty.
 
  • #10
  • #11
Perhaps it is because early writing was chiseled in stone. Direction doesn't matter as much then and some of it was written boustrophedonnicaliisticously. It may be that a direction for writing was standardized before writing on papyrus or paper was begun.
 
  • #12
How about ambidextroboustrophedonic writing? Writing 'as the ox ploughs' with both hands?

boustrophedonic text alternates left to right and right to left. Other than some dot matrix printers I don't think anybody but the poor folks who try to read early texts can even spell the durn word. And jimmysnyder too.

Glyphs may go down as well, when reading.

Hieroglyphics can go down/left/right - you can tell text direction by reading "into" faces of the gylphs. ah (the vulture guy) is an example - he can face either left or right. The "down" part is usually given by how the glyphs are situated - like along a vertical edge.
 
  • #13
jimmysnyder said:
Perhaps it is because early writing was chiseled in stone.

It can be a good explanation (but see remark below). Imagine you have a chisel and a hammer in your hands. You have hammer in your right, because - as most humans - you are right handed. I feel like logical direction of chiseling will be right to left, as this way I can see what am I doing not obscuring my view with the right hand with hammer, not to mention the fact that is much easier to hit the chisel to the left.

Problem is - writing had to evolve before it was worth of chiseling, and I find it hard to believe that it was evolving just as something that was put on stone - it takes too much effort to chisel anything. So I bet it started as something drawn or painted, but then hammer/chisel explanation doesn't hold.
 
  • #14
Maybe a powerful person at the time was left handed, and he forced R to L upon the rest?
 
  • #15
jim mcnamara said:
How about ambidextroboustrophedonic writing? Writing 'as the ox ploughs' with both hands?

It could be an urban legend but someone told me that William Howard Taft could do this simultaneously in two different languages. Well, not boustrophedon, but supposedly he could write a sentence in French with his left hand while writing a different sentence in German with his right hand.

Coincidentally he is also the only individual in history, so far, to have served as both President of the United States and as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
⚛​
 
  • #16
leopard said:
I want a poll in this thread: "Are you R or L handed?". How do I do that?
Have you viewed our PF https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=151087"?
This one was taken, January 2007.

I had an ambidextrous professor who upon writing with his left hand on the blackboard, talked for a bit (nonchalantly switching the chalk from left to right hand), then wrote the next part on the blackboard with his right hand. He didn't grin or make any other indication that he was messing with us.. Just a normal thing for him..
 
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  • #17
They write from right to left because westerners write from left to right.
 
  • #18
26% L! PF people are more gifted than the average citzen, so I take this as evidence that left handed people are more gifted in general. Even if only 82 people have answered the poll, 26% is all to high compared with the average (7-10%) to be an accident.
 
  • #19
leopard said:
PF people are more gifted than the average citzen.

You reckon?


Perheps you could check if the reverse were true. If there were say, less left handed Media students you might have something
 
  • #20
leopard said:
26% L! PF people are more gifted than the average citzen, so I take this as evidence that left handed people are more gifted in general. Even if only 82 people have answered the poll, 26% is all to high compared with the average (7-10%) to be an accident.

Similarly, men are more gifted than women?
 
  • #21
Office_Shredder said:
Similarly, men are more gifted than women?

That would be very unpolitically correct to say. I could have offended some women here. It's like drawing Muhammad.
 
  • #22
leopard said:
That would be very unpolitically correct to say. I could have offended some women here. It's like drawing Muhammad.

Well it isn't is it. And now you've mentioned Mohamed.
 
  • #23
traditionally, Chinese is written from up to down first followed by right to left. Some books are still written in this way and the cover is where you would normally be expected to find the back of the book.

More information can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese

Im guessing, but the chinese script may have been written in this way because in ancient china before paper was invented, people wrote on bamboo strips bounded together. So maybe that's why chinese was written from upwards to downwards first.
 
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  • #24
neu said:
Well it isn't is it. And now you've mentioned Mohamed.

It's OK to mention him...?

How illogical to have the front at the back when you read L to R!

One day the Chinese will stop using these stupid characters and convert to letters, which is much better! Then you only have to learn 26, not thousands.
 
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  • #25
leopard said:
One day the Chinese will stop using these stupid characters and convert to letters, which is much better! Then you only have to learn 26, not thousands.
Being able to read books in another language (mandarin vs. cantonese) and be able to read books from a 1000 years ago because although the sound of the language has changed the symbols for words haven't, might be an advantage.
 
  • #26
leopard said:
It's OK to mention him...?

How illogical to have the front at the back when you read L to R!

One day the Chinese will stop using these stupid characters and convert to letters, which is much better! Then you only have to learn 26, not thousands.

no, it is from right to left, i corrected it in my post.

Also, i think it is insensitive to call chinese characters stupid. Each character has a meaning of its own. And multiple characters can combine to form idioms and even more words.

Besides, you don't need to know all of the chinese characters in order to function from day to day.

Chinese is a very very old language, there are so many idioms and expressions that have been derived from events that happened throughout history, imo, it is not stupid for a language to have so many characters, but something to be marveled at.
 
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  • #27
leopard said:
Are there more left-handed people in Arabic countries? Or was it a left-handed guy that invented writing down there?
Arabic is written right-left because Hebrew is and they are both from the same roots.
They are written from right-left because most people are RIGHT handed and so naturally you start writing from the right. It makes sense to so this even now, eg. if you are writing down two long numbers to add them together and you want them to line up properly you start writing them with the smallest digit first.

The reason it switched to left-right in latin was that as writing became more common in business rather than just scribes it had to be faster, and for a right handed person it is quicker to move left to right. It also had the advantage of not smudging the ink you had already written. Not a problem for an illuminated manuscript where spent an hour on each word - but it did matter for taking dictation.
For a while latin and greek were written backward and forward, so alternate lines are written left-right and right-left. This is perfectly logical and the same way you would plough a field and so is called ox-path in Greek (boustrophedon).
 
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  • #28
Oerg said:
Also, i think it is insensitive to call chinese characters stupid. Each character has a meaning of its own. And multiple characters can combine to form idioms and even more words.

I respect that but I think they're all too many. Stupid compared to our system, but better than hieroglyphs.
 
  • #29
mgb_phys said:
most people are RIGHT handed and so naturally you start writing from the right.

I disagree, but I respect your view.
 
  • #30
Sorry, I updated my post but you managed to slip in yours before I fully edited mine, so yeah, take my previous post as a response.
 
  • #31
mgb_phys said:
Being able to read books in another language (mandarin vs. cantonese) and be able to read books from a 1000 years ago because although the sound of the language has changed the symbols for words haven't, might be an advantage.
The idea that Chinese writing is universal among the dialects is urban legend.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=548"

The idea that it is universal across languages (as in Japanese people can read Chinese books) is even more fantastic. As for reading 1000 year old books, in addition to changes in the language, there are also cultural changes that would make the task impossible to anyone but an expert in the field. It's no different than a native English speaker trying to read a 1000 year old English book in that respect. The characters are helping the East read each others' languages about the same as the latin alphabet is helping the West do so.

Having invested a great deal of time learning to do so, I can read Japanese fluently. All that effort would go to waste if they changed their writing system to a purely phonetic one. I'm sure that literate Japanese feel the same way. As yet unborn generations don't get much say in the debate even though they are the ones who would benefit most from the change.
 
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  • #32
leopard said:
One day the Chinese will stop using these stupid characters and convert to letters, which is much better! Then you only have to learn 26, not thousands.

I don't think you get the point of Chinese logographs. There are many different spoken languages in China and for the most part they're unrelated to each other and mutually unintelligible. The advantage of the writing system is that because it's completely unrelated to the way the words sound in any particular language two people who have no spoken language in common can communicate.

If they ditched all that for a phonetic alphabet they'd be back to having to learn each other's spoken languages before they could understand each other, like in the primitive West. Might as well go back to making knives out of stone. :-p
⚛​
 
  • #33
CaptainQuasar said:
I don't think you get the point of Chinese logographs. There are many different spoken languages in China and for the most part they're unrelated to each other and mutually unintelligible. The advantage of the writing system is that because it's completely unrelated to the way the words sound in any particular language two people who have no spoken language in common can communicate.

If they ditched all that for a phonetic alphabet they'd be back to having to learn each other's spoken languages before they could understand each other, like in the primitive West. Might as well go back to making knives out of stone. :-p
⚛​


mgb_phys said:
Being able to read books in another language (mandarin vs. cantonese) and be able to read books from a 1000 years ago because although the sound of the language has changed the symbols for words haven't, might be an advantage.

Actually, Cantonese, like CaptainQuasar said, uses the same script as Mandarin. Cantonese is a dialect spoken primarily in Hong Kong and Guangdong province. Most Chinese wouldn't understand what the Hong Kongers are saying, but they would definitely be able to read a newspaper in Hong Kong.

Another reason why you couldn't just replace those characters with alphabets is because there are many Chinese characters that have the same pronunciation.
 
  • #34
Most Chinese wouldn't understand what the Hong Kongers are saying, but they would definitely be able to read a newspaper in Hong Kong
That was my point that mandarin and cantonese are effectively different spoken languages in that they are not mutually comprehensible - although the link by jimmysnyder claims that you can't read a newspaper because the written language has been simplified to match the local usage and so has diverged along with the spoken language.

jimmysnyder said:
The idea that Chinese writing is universal among the dialects is urban legend.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=548"
That's interesting - I didn't realize that the Chinese had invented new characters as new elements were discovered.

Having invested a great deal of time learning to do so, I can read Japanese fluently. All that effort would go to waste if they changed their writing system to a purely phonetic one.
Is Japanese is getting more phonetic as more foreign and technical terms are translated phonetically in katakana?
 
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  • #35
mgb_phys said:
That was my point that mandarin and conatonese are effectively different languages in that they are not mutually comprehensible - although the link by jimmysnyder claims that you can't read a newspaper because the written language has been simplified to match the local usage and so has diverged along with the spoken language.

oh, ok, sorry to have misread your post, because you were saying reading languages in a different language followed by a mandarin vs cantonese.

And yeh, written chinese in china is a simplified version from the traditional, which is the written form used by Taiwan and Hong Kong. But due to their influences in entertainment etc., and the not so long ago switch to the simplified form, (about 60 years I think) most chinese can recognise the traditional form and the simplified form.

Whether Hong Kong and Taiwan will change their written script to the simplified form or whether the 2 written forms will diverge is pretty hard to say for the future.
 
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  • #36
mgb_phys said:
Is Japanese is getting more phonetic as more foreign and technical terms are translated phonetically in katakana?
Imported foreign words almost always are written phonetically and as time goes on, they take up a larger percentage of the entire opus of Japanese text. In that sense, you could say that the written language is getting more phonetic. However, this does not mean that the core vocabulary is being replaced with phonetic equivalents. You will need to learn Chinese characters to read Japanese for the foreseeable future.
 
  • #37
I'm fairly certain that the reason people in Arabic countries write from right to left has more to do with the Arabic language than anything else. If I'm not mistaken, it's a characteristic of semitic languages. Hebrew, both ancient and modern, is also written from right to left. If you write some Hebrew characters in Microsoft Word and try to highlight them, it'll even do this funny thing where it tries to highlight from right to left. Arabic is a derivative of Hebrew, so it stands to reason that it would be the same way.
 
  • #38
Arabic and Hebrew are both Semitic languages but I don't think that Arabic is a derivative of Hebrew, is it?
⚛​
 
  • #39
CaptainQuasar said:
Arabic and Hebrew are both Semitic languages but I don't think that Arabic is a derivative of Hebrew, is it?
No - although as you said they both come from the same roots and have some words/grammer in common.
 
  • #40
Even better if they switched to English.
 
  • #41
leopard said:
Even better if they switched to English.
Yes it's odd that they haven't really.
I can't imagine what God, who is of course originally English - although apparently moved to America on the Mayflower, thought he was doing making the Muslims and Jews both write the word of God in silly made up squiggly letters.

Personally I blame the French.
 

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