#writing systems

or, “How the transition to horizontal writing went both ways on the sides of cars”

In Japan, some company cars and trucks write the company’s name from the front of the car to the back: left to right on the left side, but from right to left on the right side.

It’s not well documented why people did that, but my personal pet theory is that this started when Japanese was still in the transition from vertical writing (columns right to left) and had to decide between which way to write Japanese horizontally.

Top to bottom, right to left

According to Wikipedia’s article on “horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts”, before WWII, Japanese was written horizontally only in one row when constrained for space, and since columns went from right to left, the one row went from right to left.

Here is an old print ad for Calpico (カルピス) where the logo, being horizontal, reads from right to left, and the ad copy underneath goes from top to bottom, right to left:

This is a lot like writing words top to bottom with upright Latin letters. Here are two signs in Dutch for a liquor store (slijterij), one vertical and the other horizontal.

But especially after WWII when Japan rushed to Westernize, Japan adopted left-to-right horizontal writing to match the Latin alphabet. This follows the footsteps of the January 1915 issue of the Chinese magazine Science, which wrote Chinese horizontally to make various scientific formulae easier to read.

本雜誌印法，旁行上左，並用西文句讀點之，以便插寫算術及物理化學諸程式，非故好新奇，讀者諒之。

This magazine is printed sideways from the top left, and marked with Western punctuation. This is to make more convenient the insertion of mathematical, physical and chemical formulae, and not for novelty's sake. We ask for our readers' understanding.

Coincidentally, this solution was mostly equivalent to rotating vertically written Japanese 90° to the left, then rotating every letter 90° to the right.

Why not both?

The thing is that there was a pretty long time in Japan where left-to-right and right-to-left writing coexisted. So when writing text on vehicles, people wrote the name from the front to the back, so that a stationary observer can read it better when the vehicle is in motion. But it’s weird now that left-to-right won out by a huge margin.

Here are two advertisement plaques for Calpico—I don’t know when the specific dates are—that have motly the same design, but the older one (using the kyūjitai 戀) goes from right to left, and the newer one (using the shinjitai 恋) goes from left to right. (I don’t know why the character in the ad looks so blackface-y, but it’s what it is...)

This post was prompted by this Quora question, which listed some times when this practice went sideways (pun definitely intended). Translation follows.

Q: Why are company names, like on the side of a truck, written from right to left?

Answer by Kōji Hirano • president of idealShip, Inc. (2006–now) • 1215 answers written, seen 130.87 million times

There are various hypotheses, but the prevailing one is that it’s in imitation of ships writing letters from the front to the back to make it clearer which side it’s facing. Though, I don’t think a truck needs to imitate that, being obvious which end is the front end of one...

Also, I’ve directly heard before that many companies do it as a good luck charm to keep the company moving forward. They seem to associate going against the direction of movement with things going badly, and want to avoid that.

I often hear the hypothesis that it’s easier for a moving car to read it when the text goes from the front to the back, but I don’t trust that...

You see this↑ brand often! It’s Sujahta. [Note: written “スジャータ”, a dairy product company, and the #1 brand of coffee creamer and chilled soup in Japan as of 2009]

Writing backwards causes these kinds of... mishaps...

Not 送輸—トイレ : [portTrans — Toilet]... but レイトー輸送 [Reitō Transport]

Not わかいあの肉 [That Young Meat]... but 肉のあいかわ [Aikawa Meats].

Not 所業エロ山 [Actions Lewd Mountain]... but 山口工業所 [Yamaguchi Industrial Works]

Not クッサア [EW, IT REEKS!]... but アサック [Asack]

"One of Yonga's personal favourites in the Frame project is Sona or Tusona, an ancient, sophisticated and now rarely used writing system.

It comes from the Chokwe, Luchazi and Luvale people, who live in the borderlands of Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Yonga's own north-western region of Zambia.

Geometric patterns were made in the sand, on cloth and on people's bodies. Or carved into furniture, wooden masks used in the Makishi ancestral masquerade - and a wooden box used to store tools when people were out hunting.

The patterns and symbols carry mathematical principles, references to the cosmos, messages about nature and the environment - as well as instructions on community life.

The original custodians and teachers of Sona were women - and there are still community elders alive who remember how it works.

They are a huge source of knowledge for Yonga's ongoing corroboration of research done on Sona by scholars like Marcus Matthe and Paulus Gerdes.

"Sona's been one of the most popular social media posts - with people expressing surprise and huge excitement, exclaiming: 'Like, what, what? How is this possible?'"

The Queens in Code: Symbols of Women's Power post includes a photograph of a woman from the Tonga community in southern Zambia.

She has her hands on a mealie grinder, a stone used to grind grain.

Researchers from the Women's History Museum of Zambia discovered during a field trip that the grinding stone was more than just a kitchen tool.

It belonged only to the woman who used it - it was not passed down to her daughters. Instead, it was placed on her grave as a tombstone out of respect for the contribution the woman had made to the community's food security.

i'm sorry but it was so jarring to see them all using this stupid fantasy language in the ATLA movie.

like dont get me wrong i love a conlang im literally a conlanger but this isnt a conlang this is a cipher of english

^ the phonetic inventory of english when it was announced, i thought this 'Avatarian' was just gonna be for Seven Havens, and i was already sad about that. The dilution of culture, the loss of real Chinese calligraphy in favor of essentially English. I was worried that Seven Havens was gonna feel too much like generic western fantasy instead of the Avatarverse... But now that it's in the Avatar Aang movie, it really makes no sense, because in Korra they literally use Chinese characters!

so in the Aang movie literally everything is in Avatarian, there's not a Chinese character in sight. It's a retcon. I understand there's an argument that Avatar pulls from a wide variety of cultures and so it deserves its own 'neutral' writing system rather than being 'biased' towards Chinese. But replacing the Chinese characters with the made-up English cipher serves to erase culture from the universe, not add to it. (Not to get too in the weeds here but imo this is a case of Sinocentrism being used as a pretext for Sinophobia...)

If they want more cultures to be represented, they could just include other scripts! They could have included writing in the air temples in Tibetan or Sanskrit or Pali, for instance! That would be incredible! But don't completely erase hanzi from the world! Chinese influence is still a part of Avatar, and Chinese characters and calligraphy are a huge part of the history of writing in East Asia! It just gives me a feeling that they want to lean away from Chinese culture, which is really disappointing. As a Chinese-American kid, I grew up on ATLA. To me ATLA is very quintessentially Asian-American. It was a gateway to my dad introducing me to wuxias and Chinese dramas, and the influences that these had on Avatar are very clear! I love seeing the work of translator and calligrapher Dr. Siu-Leung Lee in the original series and Korra, and I wish that this was carried forward in the new stuff they did! It just feels like doing it is too hard for them. Asian culture is too hard. Let's just create our own knock-off fantasy version that we own, so we can do whatever we want with it.

In summary I MISS THIS:

I haven't made any grammar or actual phonology or some words, but I did make some glyphs.

The script above is designed with the assumption that Viltrumites carve their glyphs onto objects with their raw fingers. Imagine a metal slab. A Viltrumite would use their index finger to carve almost-perfectly straight lines onto the scripture in the shape of these glyphs.

This can also be done on the land of a planet on a larger scale, by using their whole bodies. or theoretically with ink, but ever since Argall banned all art, literature, and things that give meaning to life that aren't combat arts, that's almost never happened.

Direction and orientation theoretically do not matter, since the script has been used mostly for military purposes and marking planets, but the standard orientation would be up-to-down, and every line break is reverse of that (ie. up-to-down, and the next line is down-to-up, and then the next line is up-to-down again, like how very very Ancient Greek worked).