Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts
History[change | change source]
Documents around the world have many different ways of writing. But there are mainly two ways of writing: writing horizontally (횡서, 橫書) or vertically (종서縱書). There are two kinds of horizontal writing. One kind can be read from left to right (좌횡서, 左橫書); the other is read from right to left (우횡서, 右橫書). There are two kinds of vertical writing as well: from left to right (좌정서, 左縱書) or from right to left (우정서, 右縱書). Traditionally, the countries in the Sinosphere (such as Korea, China, Japan or Vietnam) write vertically from right to left. When it was necessary to write horizontally, they wrote horizontally from right to left. When the Western culture began influencing them, they began writing horizontally from left to right, which is now used widely. Today, letters that can be written both horizontally and vertically are not common.
Long ago, people used hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs were very flexible letters. They were often written from left to right in the first line, and then right to left in the second line, and so on. This is called boustrophedon.
References[change | change source]
Other websites[change | change source]
- "UTN #22: Robust Vertical Text Layout". unicode.org. http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn22/. Retrieved 12 June 2010.
- "�@돘룕궖댷뛱궸뵼궎빾돸궸궰궋궲" (in Japanese). shosha.kokugo.juen.ac.jp. http://www.shosha.kokugo.juen.ac.jp/oshiki/essay/97yokoga.htm. Retrieved 12 June 2010.