Originally published at: A bi-directional font that can be read forwards or backwards | Boing Boing
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A great deal of the difficulty in learning to read is unlearning the (very natural and usually useful) idea that rotations/reflections of the same object sould be considered the same, i.e. b from d. For example, when my son first learned to read, I was pleased to notice that he was (then) equally competent reading upside-down.
.hguoht ,sdrawkcab daer ot tnof lanoitceridib a evah ot deen eht ees yllaer t’nod I
.sdrawkcab delleps tub ,srettel lausu ruo htiw sdrow ezingocer ot nrael ot sdeen tsuj enO
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Good point!
It is pretty cool, though. Perky’s font I mean. Odd that it’s not named in the post…is it just called Perky?
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Fun linguistics fact: Boustrophedon translates to “as the ox ploughs,” providing an illustrative agricultural metaphor. It was the standard writing style in earliest Greek examples of preserved language.
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Indeed, bi-directional writing is extremely natural to 3-6 year olds, until they unlearn it.
When my 5-year-old was drawing comics, she would always have the words coming “out” of the mouth, no matter which side the speech bubble was on:
______________ __________
( !γbbɒᗡ ollɘH ) > \O \O < ( Hi Mama! )
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ |\ |\ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
/ \ / \
This made an awful lot of sense to me.
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I kind of like it, this bidirectional reading. It takes some practice, but I can tell once you are used to the shape of words backwards, you can probably become pretty proficient.
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But writing Boustrophedon and mirror-reversing the letters in each line removes the ambiguity of which way the line is intended to be read. With symmetrical letters it is going to take longer to figure that out, and, the sentence “MOM SEES OTTO,” is ambiguous. The other alternative is reverse Boustrophedon where the alternate lines are upside down.
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→ We’re talking about 1909 technology here.
.enil hcae ta sworra tup evah tsuj nac ew sretirwepyt wen elpoep gnilles naht rehtaR ←
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The Ancient Greeks managed it, so…
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Illegible in all directions!
I can read normal type upside down, and well as reversed in a reflection, just fine. This is a neat idea conceptually, but downright painful to look at let alone actually try to read.
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Fast readers recognize whole words, if not entire groups of words, in a single glance.
So, unless you write entirely in palindromes…
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I originally learned to read upside down, as I was reading books that were read to me. I’m still not bad at it, if someone else and I have to read the same thing, I let them read it right side up while I’m opposite them.
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What was the literacy rate in Ancient Greece?
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These tend to be cursive rather than printed, but they’re pretty mind-blowing.
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yeah. and this is what kids don’t do, which is why they’re more easily able to read and write in different directions. they’re still stuck at the letter level.
for bidirectional writing you’d have to learn two sets of shapes ( or more ), and i wonder whether more similarly shaped letters would in general lead to more errors
the other thing people learn to do subconsciously is read ahead. they’re are tests where you can only see one line at a time and reading proficiency diminishes.
bidirectional writing would need to be everywhere i think to get used to the differences in timing - and your brain would have to get used to decoding both directions at once
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japanese can be vertical ( with lines starting on the top right ) or horizontal ( with lines starting on the top left ) even on the same page, and apparently while horizontal lines are written left to right now - they were initially written right to left.
Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts - Wikipedia
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This is so cool!
Is this font downloadable?
Thank you.
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Hieroglyphs were usually read from right-to left, but the direction of reading could either be horizontal or vertical. Reading direction was indicated by having all the human and animal characters face towards the beginning of the text. Lines of vertical text were separated by vertical ‘registers’.
However, the choice of direction was often whichever the writer thought looked best or which fitted best around larger images.
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Won’t anyone think of the Yodas?
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