Comments desired, please, plus any other ideas you think should be
incorporated.

Jotting #12: Writing Systems II

In Jotting #7, I discussed the various types of writing systems that a
language could use, and mentioned some languages that used each, for
illustrative purposes. When creating writing systems for world building,
you might also want to consider how the glyphs from your writing system go
together on the page.

Writing is, fundamentally, one-dimensional - that is, the glyphs are
written and read in sequence, and the order in which they are read
determines the words and their meanings that are communicated. But how that
sequence is placed on a two-dimensional surface can vary.

Most languages known to be in use at present are read and written left to
right and top to bottom. That is, one starts at the top of the page, reads
across along the first line of text from left to right, and then returns to
the left side of the page to read the second line, and so on. This appears
to be by far the most common way of doing things; languages that use all of
the types of writing systems mentioned in Jotting #7 are written this way.
Some languages, most notably languages written with variations on the
Arabic and Hebrew abjads, are written right to left and top to bottom.

Many of the languages of the Far East are classically written in vertical
columns, read top to bottom and right to left. It is increasingly common to
see these languages written left to right and top to bottom, perhaps under
the influence of early computerization (modern computers can handle
vertically-written text). An exception can be found in Mongolian; the
classical script is written top to bottom and left to right.

While comparatively rare, there are known examples - some in limited but
current use - of languages that are traditionally written and read from
bottom to top. It is common, however, for these languages to be written
left to right and top to bottom.

There are (historical) examples of scripts written as boustrophedons - that
is, alternate lines are left to right and right to left. In most, but not
all, known examples, the individual glyphs are mirrored on alternate lines.

The text of the Phaistos Disc is undeciphered, but those who have studied
it generally believe that it is written spiraling inward in a clockwise
direction. (One notable thing about the Phaistos Disc is that it is the
earliest known certain example of the use of movable type for printing.)
The pre-European-contact Mayan language was written as pairs of
side-by-side glyphs stacked vertically. Columns were read left to right.
This pattern was also used in other mesoAmerican languages.

Several present-day languages (most notably Thai and Lao, and most
languages derived from written Chinese ideograms/logograms) are written as
scriptio continua, or without spaces or punctuation; often, language that
now use spaces and punctuation were also originally written scriptio
continua.

In C.J. Cherryh's Chanur novels, one race, the T'ca, are so alien that
their messages can only be represented in Hani [using English as a
stand-in] as a 6×6 matrix of words, and one supposedly must read said
matrix in all directions to understand the message. While an interesting
idea, Cherryh does not carry it off well; the examples provided in the
story are not difficult to interpret simply reading down the columns.

The Vulcan tanaf-kitaun script at korsaya.org can actually be written in
any direction; a text starts with a symbol that unambiguously indicates the
direction of writing.

Most (but not all) scripts derived from the Latin and Greek alphabets
(including the Cyrillic script) include two forms of each letter, generally
called "upper case", "capitals", or "majuscules", and "lower case",
"small", or "minuscules", and there are grammatical and orthographic rules
governing when each is used. Letters in scripts based on the Arabic abjad
have varying forms based on the surrounding glyphs, rather than a "case"
distinction. Other scripts generally have only a single form for each glyph
("monocase"). Constructed scripts are often, but not exclusively, monocase.

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