[Edu-sig] Fwd: Which way did the chicken cross the road?

[Terry Hancock]

On Sunday 13 October 2002 09:35 pm, Jason Cunliffe wrote:
> And what about the vertical column oriented ones?
> Japanese and Chinese used to be al vertical I think, but are they still?

Serious text (e.g. in novels, manga, letters, etc.) in Japanese is still 
written vertically, starting from the upper right-hand corner and reading 
down, and then to the left. Horizontal text (reading left-to-right) is used 
in many technical and mathematical texts, presumeably for ease of mixing with 
Western scripts and mathematical notation.  In my experience, horizontal text 
is easy to set with Japanese variants of LaTeX, but correctly setting 
vertical text still eludes me.

I believe the same is true of Chinese, but I don't have much experience with 
that.

Interestingly, since Japanese is written at the word or syllable level, it 
causes less dissonance to read it in an unusual direction, and context often 
supercedes convention.  I've noticed vehicles labelled front-to-back 
regardless of which direction that implies. They extend this practice to 
English letters, too, evidently, as I have seen a picture of a Taxi labeled 
"IXAT" on the right-hand side of the vehicle (the left-hand side would read 
"TAXI" as you'd expect). Same with ships.  (If you think about it, this is 
more comfortable since the text will naturally scroll in the right direction 
as the vehicle moves).  (Caveat -- I've never been to Japan, so I'm looking 
at media sources only).

More traditional Japanese text, such as on signs will sometimes read 
horizontally, right-to-left. Presumeably this can be thought of as a series 
of columns only one-character high.  The left-to-right "truly horizontal" 
mode was introduced from the West.

Cheers,
Terry
-- 
--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com