Why is Arabic Written Right-to-Left?
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- Опубліковано 25 січ 2022
- NOTE: As many people have pointed out in the comments, it's important to remember that this is only one theory of the evolution of script systems. The derivation of Brahmi script from Aramaic is especially contentious and is seen by many modern linguists as an outdated theory. There were also some simplifications regarding the origins of the Arabic script for the sake of saving time: I apologise if either of these things were misleading.
Written and Created by Me.
Art by kvd102
Uh, your video ends awkwardly
Actually, its ending is perfect.
and I like it
@@leesnyder1887 nah its way funnier when ending abruptly, also get ad blocker
(and since when do ads play at the _end_ of a video???)
@@MINECRAFTLOVER4000 Ads've played at the end for a very long time already.
@@tibethatguy i havent had ads on youtube in like 4 years lmao
Me, a left handed Arabic writer:
**signature look of superiority**
GIGACHAD
SAMEEEE
I'm left-handed and write Farsi.
fax
Once I studied Arabic and asked if in Arabic places there is more or less left-handed people. I expected more, because if you use ink and write right to left, a right ended people would spatter ink on the paper. The teacher replied me that actually the norm is to be right-handed and that formerly left-handed people were corrected, which is the same they used to do in Europe. Actually, both in the Middle East and in Europe the right direction is considered the most important: the opposite of right is also wrong, the second most important person is the "right arm" of the boss, the name Benjamin means "the son on the right", and so on.
Fun fact: Japanese also used to write right to left, but was changed to left to right post war. However, Japanese can also be written vertically, which is written right to left. This is the reason why Japanese books are like arabic books.
That’s what I was thinking, thank you
Japanese (and the other East Asian scripts) has characters that are more independent in their cadence, placement and meaning than the Western alphabets and abjads. The reason being that in a language like English, the spelling style requires letters to flow into each other. The letter 'e' can imply at least 6 or 7 different sounds just from context, and its function in a word also varies from context. This makes it difficult for English speakers to just switch directions, as you need to look at a whole word to be able to know exactly how to pronounce it.
By comparison, Japanese and Korean are syllabaries. That pretty much exempts them from this problem, as all of the sounds are compartmentalised, there isn't a necessary flow that is required to accurately pronounce a phoneme, or a whole word. Chinese is more independent as it's a logography, so the writing itself tells you nothing about how to pronounce it, leading to what is basically a direction-independent writing system (in theory).
@@m_uz1244 it is mostly direction independent, except when you write. There it is easier to write in a certain direction than in another.
Wow
When Japanese was written right to left, it technically still counted as writing vertically, just with the column length of one character. This is why these old inscriptions usually don't have more than one line.
3:54
A note on that, actually every Arabic speaker I know, (if they are right-handed) writes everything on paper by turning the whole page by 45° to the left :)
So yes, they are indeed better at not smudging ink
Why thanks i guess? 😂
Yes, I can't write without titling the paper a little, it just hurts my hand.
indeed. i used to do that at school. sometimes almost turning the paper 90 degrees too.
I picked this up in left->right scripts from my leftie friends due to a mangled finger that doesn't bend enough causing me issues, now if I try writing "normally" the text starts to shift diagonally lol
Arabic and Syriac letters are formed so that you hold the pen right under where you write the letter. This unlike Latin cursive where the letters are tilted so that the pen is placed to the right of the letter being written. Tilting the paper 45° is done by almost all languages, because that's the angle of your lower arm when you sit at a desk.
this just shows that history isn't mainly about knowing events but rather knowing how everyday life used to be and how it affected the events that happen today.
Things that happen in everyday life are still events.
This was by far the BEST ending of a video essay i have ever seen.
This is a video essay?
@@photojokimeven9185 Yes
Quite literally an >essai
@Ali Al-Mahdi I've seen this before. Is this a copypasta?
@Ali Al-Mahdi That's an interesting idea and all, but that seems so random and out of place. And stop talking about menstruation. geez louise.
I am an Arab, learned Arabic first, then french in primary schools. One thing I noticed when writing left to right when using the right hand is that you can see the sentence you're writing, while in Arabic I could see what I was writing only after four or five words because my hand blocks the view.
Edit : did another experiment, and wrote with my eyes closed, in Arabic, the sentences were perfect, as though it was normal writing. Whereas in english the sentences were not aligned nor were fully comprehensible.
No
Everyday lefthanded problems, and my entire hand being completely smudged
As a left-handed, the opposite is true, I can see the word I'm writing in Arabic and I can't in English or French.
You could argue this is a good way to remember the vocabulary better.
Because your fingers were too close to the writing ink tip. Hold the pen a little bit further and you will see the letters. You can even adjust the angle you are writing with, by spinning your hand a little bit clockwise and you will have greater control and view.
As a native speaker of Arabic, we are indeed better at not smudging ink.
I'm not joking, I was always confused at left handers complaining about smudging ink when they wrote in English or German, until I realised they write differently than an Arabic right handed person would. When you write in Arabic, at least the way I was taught, but presumable this is standard, you write from "below" the lines you write. That way your hand and the script doesn't intersect, since you write from up to down. If anyone tries this and it feels uncomfortable for their hand, rotate the paper until it doesn't, that's the secret.
I don't know why the left handers in western script seem to unnaturally coil their hand around the words they write in such a way that smudges the words they write, but it did seem quite unnatural to me when I noticed it.
that's what happen when a majority of the population may struggle and is therefore told how to do it. you end up with Arabic right-handed people.
on the other hand left handed people were usually shamed and represented a minority in Europe. as a consequence they each struggle their own way and there wasn't an environment to helped them learn a way to write properly. As a left-handed person living in europe i never once was taught how to write the left handed way and people just assumed i should use right-handed technique and achieve similar results. That being said the fact i was witting personal notes in the hebrew script certainly didnt help me to get the gig of it.
Yeah this is true! I didn’t realize it until you said it 😂😂. When I write in arabic I tilt the paper to the left naturally no one told me to do so.
idk bro even being native at Arabic i still smudge my fingers at times even today
I'm a left-hander European, and in school i'd hook my wrist for writing, tilting the copybook slightly to the left, like the teacher kept telling the class to do, but everyone else in class was a righty! So of course I would also smudge the ink as well. When I went to university i saw a fellow left-hander filling out the class journal, tilting it to the right (a bit too much in my opinion, but it worked). I tried it myself, and was so happy that i could finally write with more comfort.
@@mayosski That's 100% true. My father is left handed and was forcibly taught to write with his right hand in school in the 70's. He struggled a lot in primary school because of that and only began writing up to speed when he learned by himself to write with his dexterous left hand during secondary school. So yeah, schools in Germany really just acted like left-handed people didn't exist until nearly the end of the last millenium!
Even when my older brother went to primary school in the 00's, it was still a rather recent development in schools to teach left-handed students to write with their left hand, rather than trying to convert them to right-handedness and ink pens specifically made for left-handed users were also kind of new on the market.
Makes me glad that I'm right-handed and didn't have to deal with any of that. 😅
I'm from Iran and of course I write from right to left in my native language. But I say writing from right to left makes little to no sense for 2 reasons:
- Most people are right-handed and when writing, their right hand covers the last few words which is inconvenient.
- We write words from right to left, but we still have to write numbers from left to right! that's where it really becomes irritating, cause we have to guess how much space we're gonna need!
You could just reverse writing direction instead of guessing. I.e. instead of writing
اشتريته بـ 5000 دينار
like
ا←←←←{→→}←←
You write a zero, a zero, a zero, then a five.
ا←←←←←←←←←
tf that s make no sense u can just for example if you have a number 42015 instead of guessing the space and going 4-2-0-1-5 just start with writing 5 first and probleme solve
Why do you do that? Wouldn't make more sense to write numbers in the same direction you write other stuff?
@@VieiraFi let me see 12= ١٢in Arabic lets reverse it ٢١ = 21 which makes no sense
@@Roxve Not sure I follow, sorry I know literally nothing about your script.
For Chinese, you can even, sometimes, write the first character then the third character then the second then the fourth, and no one realises that's wrong
This is cursed. It's like writing in reverse stroke order.
In English we can mix up letrets too and it's just hadrer to read.
@@Qermaq In English, you have to screw up a lot of letters before it becomes a significant issue. The main reason being that we read based on the shape of the entire word, and if the letter order swapping doesn't affect the overall shape of the word much, you probably won't have too much trouble figuring it out. Obviously, the more letters you screw up, the harder it is to read, but you have to mess up a fairly substantial number before you've got a problem.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade Is that different from how other languages are read?
@@Qermaq not from any I know, no
im arab and a way to avoid smudging is to rotate what we write on 90 degrees to the left and basically write top to bottom,
and the way right handed people sit to write is the hand is placed on the desk and the paper angled so that the hand is moves naturally down, same with english i think
I think it's more about the fact that our hand itself write with an angle that is lower than 60 degrees so the text will look good which puts the hands under the line of writing, while in english you kinda need to put the pen close to 90 degree
It must be quite advantageous to be a left-handed Arab then 😂
@@EgnachHelton just don’t eat with your left hand!
@@EgnachHelton growing up, my parents used to slap my left hand when ever I try to use it to write, alot of other muslim families does that too.
@@EgnachHelton me a left handed arab : 👌😎👍
just looking at the script, I would assume that the old way to write arabic was with a brush. I'm pretty sure that when writing with a brush, you don't have as much hand-to-surface contact as when you write with a pen or feather, which I think was more common where people used the latin script. chalk on slate might have been too, which would also be written with more hand contact than writing with a brush.
on the other hand, it does seem weird to use a brush mostly in a pushing direction... unless they held it vertical, which I think the chinese and japanese do for the most part.
They actually use different tools for writing like Java pen, Celi pen, Handam pen, Bamboo pen, Khamish pen. They’re quite different from s brush.
Amathos interesting. I just guessed brush because of the very varied stroke width, but of course very wide pens like that do this too.
I'm pretty sure they used a Qalam. It's like a bamboo stick with a hole for ink and a chiseled tip. You can find pics on google.
I love how the ‘map of the phonecian-derived scripts’ is basically just a world map with China, Korea and Japan removed
And Ethiopia
the right-to-left -> left-to-right happened in the Chinese script as well. When written horizontally, it was originally written right-to-left (the same as when writing vertically) but some time in the early to mid 20th century this changed due to western influence to be left-to-right. If you look at old Chinese/Japanese/Korean signs or newspapers you can still see the right-to-left horizontal writing
Why? But if you gonna write the character u start from left to right isn't?
@@benkyo5177 that's true, it's weird. Each individual character is written left-to-right but the text as a whole is read right-to-left
Chinese script was usually written vertically, in which case writing the character from left-to-right is less strange. The reading direction for horizontal text probably just mimicked the vertical reading direction
@@benkyo5177 oh that is a different story, each character has a definite stroke order you must follow depending on which school you choose (sometimes not) to follow. Meaning it doesn't matter if you use right to left or left to right, you must write the characters in the way they are supposed to be written, and a quick note on japanese, almost all the japanese novels I've seen are printed in top to bottom right to left still in modern times..
But, right to left is kind of an issue unless you abandon stroke order, as the stroke order will generally get you from one character to the one that's either to the right or below the one you've just read. Did they change the stroke order, or was stroke order just stupid under the previous direction of writing?
@@SmallSpoonBrigade horizontal writing was not very common (vertical was the standard for pretty much everything) so I don't think this would've posed much issue until it became more common after WWII. Which is when they switched to left-to-right for horizontal writing
When i first started learning English, i was surprised that it is written left to right, same way an English speaker would be surprised Arabic is written right to left.
I can see that, if you haven't seen a lot of actual handwriting, I can see how one wouldn't necessarily know which way a language is written. I do think that Arabic has more of a hint that it's written opposite way around as it's more of a cursive writing style than the typical English writing.
why do you have so few subscribers?? your content is awesome
well you'll just have to spread the good word my dude :D
@@kklein not a dude but i will :D
@@cassandradawn780 I'm so sorry that was supposed to be a gender neutral "dude" fkakfkakf, I guess that just goes to show the harmful implications of having masculine language seen as the default.
@@kklein Eh, if people just recognize that you default to masculine then I don’t see the problem, not really something that matters anyway lol and it’s much easier to have a default than gender neutral stuff in some languages
because he started publishing content like 4 months ago ;w;
1:08, slightly correction, the diacritic at the very top of the word that kind of looks like a 3 does not represent a vowel. It is called a shaddah, and it instead indicates that the letter under it is supposed to be two of the same letter. It could, alternatively, be written like this:
مُعَلْلِم
But the proper way is as shown in the video. This letter is called mushaddad, and that means it is a geminated consonant. There are other diacritics as well that do not represent vowels. For example, the sukun, which looks like a circle, indicates the absence of a vowel, and the hamza (depending on whether you consider it as a diacritic or not) represents a glottal stop.
Long story short it's a stress mark :d
@@tyouking3449 in essence
is the hamza that y looking thing? also what is that diacritic that's a line above a letter but it's vertical called?
As an Arab, a common misconception I see in the comments saying that in arabic you write Numbers from Left to Right, actually I was taught in preschool and in religious school to write and pronounce numbers from Right to Left, and I still see many people do that which is nice (at least for nostalgia), so for example 1502 is pronounced Two and Five hundred and One thousand
Many European languages retain this 'reverse' word order for numbers even though English has lost it. For example, a line from the English nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence" [A British coin that was first minted in 1551.] has the line, "'Four and twenty' blackbirds baked in a pie."
I'm an Arab and I write and pronounce numbers from left to right, I never heard of anyone pronouncing numbers like that but oh well you learn something everyday
In German (and Dutch) you mix the reading of numbers (both directions) :
23145 would be three-and-twenty-thousand-onehundred-and-five-and-fourty
@@moonhunter9993 that... Yea that hurts my feeble lil brain
@@moonhunter9993 that's how exactly it's read in Arabic too, people who use that "right to left" reading of numbers are counted on hands, they're just religious weirdos who want to be special
This was a really well explained and nicely presented video! You did a great job!
Greek was written from right to the left, up until the 8th-9th centuries BC.
There was an intermediate period which was written with a mixed system: the line was starting from the top right moving to the left. When it reached the end of the paper, the next line started from the left and was moving to the right. The third line started from the right and was moving to the left and so forth. This system is called βουστροφιδον (voustrofidon), which literally translates to : the way the oxen moves when it plows the land.
Same for the indus valley script, and that's about 5000 years ago
loved this video omg! i’m an arab and never really thought about the way that we write and how it differs from other scripts. pls do more linguistics type videos. u deserve a million subs! keep it up :)
Arabic is beautiful and unique, it's like an art.
so thankful to be an Arab.
Agreed, I'll never be able to read it (especially on computers where the writing is extremely tiny and hard to read without zooming in), but Arabic is definitely an aesthetically pleasing language 👍
@@WackoMcGoose as a native Arabic speaker trust me you're not alone! I literally have all my devices set to English for that reason :,]
It's so crazy to think that we have progressed with technology so much but we still haven't set a good font or size to Arabic text (in most sites), ig you just have to get used to it.
@@jadeai989 From my experience (as someone with no intent to learn arabic, merely appreciation of the writing system's aesthetics), the problem is that the meaningful part of the letters takes up so little of the vertical space of the line, because the starting letter(?) of each word is drawn so tall and the rest of the word so short. The difference between two completely different letters can be literally a single pixel, depending on the font and size.
Compare with Hebrew (something i briefly tried, was able to learn the alefbet, but promptly crashed once the reality of an abjad crashed into me), which has individual glyphs that take up the _full_ line height and can easily be told apart at normal zoom level. "Yup, that's an aleph, and that one's a lev, and..."
@@WackoMcGoose personally I don't find it as a problem (on a more logical sense this is probably the most efficient way to standardize Arabic text) so much so as it being just an eye sore to look at, we Arabs see typography and writing in general as a respectable form of art (and there are many scripts of writing with interesting historical backgrounds!!) so to see a sentence that would be usually written irl in more bold-ish letters and A much wider space to a very thin and tiny text is a teeny bit infuriating.
also, thank you for being interested in Arabic it's always nice to see non speakers genuinely interested in it :-) + (nice Homestuck pfp)
@@jadeai989 Oh yeah, I've seen plenty of handwritten arabic (that i can actually see that the letters are distinct shapes) and it's a beautiful writing system, and if I wasn't so smoothbrained that my brain bluescreens at the concept of "where's the fscking vowels at bruh", I'd give it an honest chance to try learning the basics someday.
(that and i technically have my hands full with polish right now, so przepraszam, ale muszę się uczyć polskiego~)
You have certainly got a new fan, duuuude, your channel is awesome, I'm gonna go continue binge watching it xD
What I like in your videos more than the topics being discussed, are your presentation, and sense of humour. definitely deserve subscription. Keep it up 👏
I clicked on this, and watched a bit, and it was only when I went to read the comments that I was surprised to learn this was a video with only 3k views!
This was an entertaining video and I honestly think you have a lot of potential, I mean I personally am not even that big a fan of historic types of videos and I still had a good time with this one.
Keep up the good work!
After 2 days it is 20k now, he is skyrocketing! :D
@@r.t.5767 wow I see, well you've seen it here first folks!
@@r.t.5767 150k !!!
A good parallel is the Chinese-derived languages, which also switched directions, this is why Japanese Manga reads right to left. Modern Chinese and Japanese are written left to right, but some books and signage from less than 100 years ago is right to left(mostly top to bottom and they arrange rows right to left).
I suspect technology plays a part. It is easier toswitch direction if we are dealing with stonw(give each hand resting time), then from right to left when carving into clay, then the pen and ink make it easier to write left to right(smudging the ink), but the printing press makes it easier from right ro left(placing tiles from close to far from right hand) so if a culture go from clay to printing press without fully changing direction they might just stay right to left
Japanese is not derived from Chinese. They are not even related to each other. Japanese just has an adstrate from Chinese in the form of hieroglyphics.
I think Chinese characters are particularly strange because the strokes within each individual character are (generally) written top-to-bottom and left-to-right, so it's really strange that Chinese text was traditionally written top-to-bottom and right-to-left.
I thought vertical writing was the traditional east Asian way
Hangul isn't derived from chinese, but I always wondered if they switched directions or they were always like that
@@ems7623 Yes, but check this sentence out:
A paragraph is a self-contained unit of discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. Though not required by the orthographic conventions of any language with a writing system, paragraphs are a conventional way of organizing extended segments of prose.
You notice you read left to right, but the lines are read top to bottom. Same in east asia, you read top to bottom, but lines are read right to left
Fantastic video, this is the kind of video that makes me have to pause like ten times just to go down multiple wikipedia resarch rabbit holes. I'll be thinking about languages all day now.
Such a nice editing and info I didn't knew, thx subscribed
I clicked on this because I read the title and thought, "This is a 30 second question, but it's 5 minutes. I wonder what is gonna be rambled about."
Interesting thing with Mongolian (and other syriac derived vertical scripts) , is that it's up->down, left->right. Unlike Chinese derived scripts which are up->down, right->left. So if you were to turn mongolian on its side, it should be so that it's read right->left, Up->Down like it is in syriac.
So glad I found this channel. Love short vid format linguistics like these!
Loving your videos, all of them have been super interesting and thoughtful. Love the interjections of humour. 👏 Subscribed!
I just had the biggest laugh when that ending hit. Now I am subscribed :))
Please do a video on the Ancient Filipino writing Baybayin and it's other variants. From what I learned they were written either right to left, left to right, bottom to top and top to bottom.
your videos are some of the most entertaining, easily digestible and educational content on youtube
I was on the fence, but you won me with that ending. Subbed.
Being left handed and using a left to right writing system leads to fun things, like being told you can't learn to write traditional Kanji with a brush. Or figuring out that you can have your fountain pen in the correct position for doing calligraphy, if you write every character upside down. You also get very good at reading upside down text. If you want a silly skill to confuse strangers with, I highly recommend it.
Great video but one correction though. Ge'ez is officially used in Eritrea as well, in fact the earliest record of the Ge'ez script is found in Eritrea.
Arabic too, that's why he striped the map of Eritrea.
@@Zeyede_Shewangzou Eh, by that logic Ethiopia should be striped too because English is taught in school. Eritrean kids don't learn Arabic in school however, it's only found on street signs like with the Latin script in Ethiopia.
Either way, he should have mentioned Eritrea because Ge'ez is the main script by far, like in Ethiopia.
I love your videos. They have a vibe of old xidnaf
surprisingly a channel I've watched very little of aha
Good job with that, but you should also specify that the theory of Brahmi's Aramaic descent is not accepted by majority of linguists( though Kharosthi being younger than Brahmi shows both Aramaic and Brahmi influences), it's like a 50-50, since Brahmi script shows similarities with Indus valley pictograms as well, though some are similar to Aramaic script.
Personally, the direction of writing doesn't matter to me, since I am ambidextrous and quite comfortable with both Alphabets, abjads and abugidas, I use my hands accordingly. But if you ask me, Abugidas are better suited for expressing the phonemes of languages to a 98% compared to other scripts, don't need much space and can handle with consonant-rich, vowel-rich or even tonal languages alike. Arabic is excellent for shorthand and calligraphy.
Brahmi script is more similar to Aramaic than to Indus valley script. Even tho we haven't deciphered Indus valley script, it certainly wasn't an Abugida because it has way more characters than an Abugida would have. Mandatory diacritics in Brahmi evolved from optional diacritics of Aramaic.
Bro plz plz plz make a video on the Arabic root template system, it's one of the most powerful and unique features of the language. For example k-t-b root can make over 20 different unique words
It's like suffixes on steroids. Where even the base word is like a -fix.
~a~a~a
كَتَبَ
~u~u~
كُتُب
~i~aa~
كِتَاب
ma~~a~
مَكتَب
ma~~a~ah
مَكتَبَة
ma~aa~i~
مَكَاتِب
~i~aa~ah
كِتَابَة
ma~~uu~
مَكتُوب
And many more which apply to other words
This is a feature of Hebrew as well and of all Semitic languages
@@MrEVAQ Modern day Hebrew took that from Arabic, old Hebrew didn't have that system. I'm not sure about other Semitic languages tho
@@Melia_67 Not true, this is a feature of all Semitic languages.
For example, in the Hebrew Bible (compiled more than 2,000 years ago) says:
1. Katuv (Daniel 8:14)
2. Mikhtav (2 Chronicles 35:4)
3. Khetav (Esther 8:8)
4. Kotev (Jeremiah 36:8)
5. Ketovet (2 Chronicles 34:24)
And there are more in modern Hebrew.. And the same applies to Aramaic.
One thing I was really hoping to see was a mention of Urdu. It's a relatively new language, written similar to Arabic, like an easier version of Arabic (?) (Sounds similar to Hindi too lol) Idk much about it's family tree but it's also written from right to left. Urdu is said to mean 'language of the armies' and as the story goes it's a mix of Turkish, Arabic, Hindi and more because these armies didn't have any means to communicate so they made up a new language by borrowing words from here and there.
Interesting, as a Pakistani I didn't know Urdu meant that
But I would say Urdu is written similarly to Farsi (Persia)
@@Atbatross Ah yes I forgot Farsi.
Anyways, I believe I learned in school that Urdu translates to 'lashkari zuban'.
For Japanese, what someone in the US calls the back cover is actually the front cover, as Japan sometimes goes from top to bottom, right to left.
I really really like your modest conclusion 🙏
3:44 This theory is perhaps supported by the fact that Leonardo da Vinci, Who was Left-Handed, Often wrote "Backwards", Which is to say right to left, Thought to be to avoid smudging the ink as he wrote.
The ink-writers versus chisel-writers makes a lot of sense for writing left to right vs right to left
The sudden end confused me so much that I went back a few seconds and rewatched them to make sure I didn't miss something because for me it sounded like the sentence wasn't finished.
Man, this was awesome, don’t be so rough on yourself, it was very interesting!
Nice video!
My theory is that neither writing systems nor their writing direction weren't really standardised for most of human history, and different peoples wrote similar scripts in different direction.
Tifinagh, Greek, and Brahmi, and a lot of the non-switched scripts seem to have standardised their writing direction around the end of the last centuries BCE. Maybe the worldwide rise of a scribe class in government caused most written languages to standardise in a particular direction instead of being able to write it in either?
A very good point.
I love this. I have a question: do you know if trilateral Arabic consonantal roots are derived from a bilateral proto-consonantal root?
what? really? can you give me few examples?
@@zenalexander9278 Well, I was reading an article by a researcher by the name of Kashif Khan, who posts his work on LinkedIn about the meanings of individual Arabic words in the Qur’an. He was saying that Arabic trilateral roots actually come from proto-bilateral roots. The example he gave was the ص-و-م comes from ص-م. But when I tried to search up proto-bilateral roots in the Arabic Language I couldn’t find anything about it. The only thing I found was that some Hebrew trilateral roots are derived by proto-bilateral roots.
Very well made and informative video
u are great, this video helped me a lot. thanks u gentleman and saludos from argentina
I think the reason that a lot of languages didn't switch is because of the culture. Arabic had a strong culture, and so, because tradition dies hard, we didn't switch. While for the greeks they were just starting writing so they hadn't established a strong culture. So writing left to right or right to left were both accepted, and then some people had the idea of not switching the direction in the midst of a paragraph, and people were able to read in both directions, so they were able to read in one direction as well. And the majority chose the left to right because it's easier with a pen
Source: trust me bro
I wasn't really buying this cultural argument, but then you said "source: trust me bro" and now I'm sold
But…… Greeks civilization is older and developed earlier than proper arabic civilization on the Peninsula. In this situation, about what stron culture you think?
@@SkyMikolajMak I think by culture the parent comment means "literary tradition". Basically most Arabs read Quran, which keeps the standard Arabic language from changing very much. Though this argument alone is not enough because by definition the language Qur'an was written in existed before Qur'an.
That is a load of bull. The Arabs had a mostly spoken, not written culture. They also were not painters or sculptures at that. Arabs lagged behind significantly in architecture, arts, science, and even theology.
@@SkyMikolajMak George Sarton: In his book, The Civilization of the Arabs, he says: The Arabs previously led the world in two long phases, the first remained for two thousand years before Greece, and the second lived for four centuries during the Middle Ages, and no one can prevent these peoples from leading the world again in the near or far future.
I'm Arabic, so when I write in Arabic, I turn the paper from vertical to horizontal, so you can say I'm writing from the top to the down, and I see many doing the same.
Arabic is the language. Arabian is the nationality. Arab is the ethnicity.
Hope that helps!
@@stefanofeblesverastegui8869 that was helpful thanks a lot
@@chikage801 U welcome uwu
long answer: we don't know
short answer: we don't know
I do believe IT IS INTERESTING! I’ve always asked myself why is Hebrew and Arabic written from right to left? Thank you for addressing it.
Hey, very nice video as always!
I just wanted to add my two cents. On 0:15 you write about Russian and use "русский язык". True that in Russian itself one don't have to capitalise language names, but the rule only applies within sentences. If you mention stuff on its own or start a phrase from the word (including the language name) it is proper to capitalise, so I think "Русский" without "язык" would be more consistent with how you wrote about English.
Sorry, I am just a little annoyed at how often capitalisation rules are ignored for Russian((
Hope I change your mind or at list spark some fun discussions. Cheers!
okay cool mind has been changed :)
@@kklein I’m the voice for change, haha.
Thanks!
@@Kret4en yeah. It is annoying when rules are not kept especially peace
@@trueordrue could not agree with you more. I hope someday there will be a possibility to discuss that in Russia. I personally have been to protests in February, unfortunately they did not go far enough, a lot of the best people of Russia were cruelly beaten and faced legal consequences for being voices for peace. Living under tyranny is not wholly the fault of the people. I have been 2 when Putin came into power, I have barely seen anyone else but this cruel old man in power.
That all being said, Russian is now a language of war. I like linguistics no matter what. As far as I know, same capitalization rules apply to other slavic languages like Ukrainian and Belorussian
@@trueordrue Here's an idea - how about we not randomly inject politics into a discussion that has nothing to do with it? I know, revolutionary right?!
I think it's remarkable how so many alphabets are derived, albeit indirectly, from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
When I started as a little kid to learn to write Arabic (from right to left) and French (from left to right), it all came very natural to me and I switched easily between both systems. I didn't even think about it !
there was a point in time when i was a kid and first learned to write and copy down notes for school on my notebook that i tried to do boustrophedon to be absolutely space efficient with every page with no writing space wastage on each page, but it kinda quickly looked like a newspaper and seemed cluttered to read from afar.
Not sure if it has any connection but a LOT of Burmese people write by tilting the paper 90 degrees to the left, so it's bottom up, right to left. I assume it's mostly because public schools here don't have much space (several students sit on long benches) so they changed the paper's orientation to make more room for themselves and others. Perhaps it sounds unlikely but hey, who knows?
I am left-handed, and I do some calligraphy, and Hebrew is much easier than English for me. I wonder if left-handedness was more common among scribes in the ancient world.
Great video, amazing ending.
Amazingly well summed up in the end, and
I agr
Another thing to notice about the difference between writing from the right or the left is how numbers are read. English is written from the left, so numbers are read from the left, so 1987 is one thousand nine hundred eighty seven.
In standard Arabic, numbers are read from right to left, so 1987 is seven and eighty and nine hundred and one thousand (سبعة وثمانون وتسعمئة وألف).
Makes sense, right?
What's interesting is that German, though written from left to right like most languages, has its two-digit numbers read from right to left like Arabic.
Brilliant! Never thought of it this way 😃
wow, never thought of it
رائع woow
Franks are arabs, like all the royal families of europe.
I really busted out laughing in my room with that ending! xD
I remembered that a speech of Ted. It talks about how people think in different cultures.
There is a point that the direction of sun movement influence in our thinking. Because people from different countries observe the stars and sun in different direction. Ancient Eastern Asians observed the southern sky,so the sun and mood rises on the right and set down on the left for them. So Classical Chinese Japanese are written from right to left.
As someone with dyslexia it was really fun needing to rewind every 10 seconds of this video like 8 times.
Fun fact: My parents have cards signed by me as a kid where I write my name mirrored backwards (right to left with letters mirrored), because I am left-handed that was apparently more natural for me at that age.
Some are mentioning Japanese writing system so I add some information I know...
Japanese writes up to bottom. Vertical writing is widely considered to be the mainstream for proper writing. For example novels, dictionaries or even Haiku (Japanese shot poetry) are written vertically. It is safe to say that the traditional way of writing Japanese is vertical.
Vertical writing of Japanese language begins from a top right corner of a paper to the bottom of a line and it indents to the left to start a new line.
On the other hand Japanese can be written horizontally depending on situations. Currently, horizontal writing of Japanese is done from left to right but about more than 70 or something years ago it was common to write from right to left.
I heard that this is simply because horizontal writing of Japanese language was a consequences to the vertical writing which has only one letter for each lines.
Imagine you preparing a rectangular sign, a vertically wide one, for a temple. You would start from top right corner to write temple's name vertically but the plate has just a space for one letter so you indent with just the first letter. This is when right to left writing happens. When you keep it going like one letter and indent, one letter and indent and so on you end up with a horizontal writing of right to left pattern.
This is why written Japanese used to have right to left pattern. It looks like horizontal writing but it's spirit is more like vertical writing with only one letter for each lines.
Horizontal Japanese is basically 100% of the japanese internet. Unlike mongolian, which is written vertically even in the internet
Just a little bit of the Chinese perspective: Before paper was invented, the most disposable and yet portable writing surface was the scroll made from bound bamboo strips. Mind you that it was also before the use of desks and chairs, so mostly one would be sitting on the floor and holding the scroll in the air with the left hand. Try it with a piece of rolled paper and you will understand why it is convenient to write from top to bottom (palm facing up is the most stable, thus vertical scroll) and right to left (as you scroll in and out to get more blank surface). The same applies to reading a scroll without the clumsiness of fully extending it. In fact, the way to view a long horizontal scroll of painting was not to hang or lay it completely open but to scroll in and out, each time only viewing a part of the painting like watching episodes. I don't think it was the ancient scribes' topmost concern to avoid touching the wet ink.
Incredible ending!
That’s cool that there’s been multiple switches within the language family.
Chinese switched direction in modern times from top-down right-left to left-right top-down to be in line with everyone else. They could easily do this because the characters are easily rearranged without reflection unlike letters of words.
Interestingly Akkadian cuneiform was first written top to bottom like Chinese, but switched to left to right because other languages around it, like Egyptian, were written horisontally.
In a world where "modern" and "civilized" people can't decide on which side of the road to drive, this ancient problem with the writing direction seems normal and logical.
Nice vid man.
@ 3:36 As I child, with no knowledge of linguistics or writing systems I actually speculated that’s why we (or most languages) wrote from left to right.
One thousand and one nights it is not the most popular book in Arabic for arabs and muslims generally, as an Arabic the most popular book in arabic after the Holy Quran is the Bukhari book and its explanation of ibn Hajar Al-asqalani , arabs have many great book and more important than thousand and one nights , and thnks💙
Yes, One Thousand and One Nights is only popular in the Englishspeaking world, in translation.
He said, “These are two of the most famous books in the Arabic language.” He never said they were the most popular in the Arab or Muslim world, not did he say they were the two most famous in general. He was just providing examples that most English speakers would know, and I’d argue that he was right anyway, that those are two of the most famous Arabic language books on a global scale.
@@skyworm8006 ok thank you💙, now I understand a little
@@lif6737 sir , I think that the most popular book in some language is the once which the native speakers knows and appreciate, not the globe knows , that is my culture and I just want to say that we have more and more important and most amazing than one thousand and one nights, It is a good book but not in the top in our culture , if the globe think that it can summarize our library and historical civilization in 1001nights the globe would be dreaming
صدقت 👌
Most underrated channel on youtube
I love this ending so much
Man, us lefties just can't get a break: most writing systems go left-to-write, making writing as a lefty slightly difficult, as we have to push against the pen and paper. -Now Arabic is written right-to-left, but to be a lefty in Arabian society is bad news.- 😒
Edit: Thanks for the heads up, guys.
As an arabic speaker writing from left to right while using arabic alphabets is just torture every single alphabet in arabic is not really made for left to right and it will look pretty ugly too
"To be a lefty in Arabian society is bad news" what? As a lefty arab this is literally the first time in my life I've ever heard of it 😂 that's a lie buddy
to be lefty in arabian SOCIETY is bad news ????
speak for ur family or whatever
ive never seen somebody angry bcs his son is lefty that's too ridiculous lol
Being lefty in the Arab world maybe was cursed a century ago, but nowadays it’s very rare to hear someone advising you to stop writing in left hand, let alone cursing it.
As an Arab, I can confirm that we have nothing against lefty people at all.
The misunderstanding stems from the fact that as Muslims (Not Arab), We eat, drink, and greet people using the right hand. But by no means are people looked down upon for using their left hands.
In my family, the lefties are known to have the prettiest handwriting. We look up to them not consider them "bad news".
My 'theory' is that early developers of the script were left-handed, and that they made it go right-to-left for easier writing, to avoid smudging the ink, etc.
One big difference between Arabic and the others in this video is the Arabic script is a Written script as opposed to carved.
It was created by pen/brush, and not chiseled into stone; the fact that, even in 'printed' form, it's written as cursive; the letters' shapes depending on where they're placed in the word.
I was thinking that maybe some very prolific writers might have been left-handed
I love how your go-to examples of parallel universes are Philip Pullman's books. I thought you would've gone with more popular examples like marvel movies
3:50 afaik there are some examples of boustrophedon written in scrolls, I think in some sort of religious stuff so yeah doesn't hold water much
PS One of my Mongolian teachers insisted on learning the traditional script in both directions (as if it wasn't already insanely hard to read vertical and horizontal) because apparently people in IM still occasionally use the mirrored version, no idea why they'd do it other than when studying historical documents which aren't even in Khalkha. Still, a fun exercise and boustrophedon looks really cool in the notebook :v
Arab Alphabet is not only writing in Arabic, but used for writing Malay (Jawi), Sundanese and Javanese (Pegon), Cham, Turkic (Uyghur, Kazak Community in China, etc.), Madgaskar (Sorabe), Spain (Amajaido), Chinese (Xiaoerjing), Urdu, Pastho, Dari, Persian, Tajik, Kurdish.
Arabic and Hebrew are just basically superior languages.
(Incoming seething)
אני מסכים אנחנו הכי טובים
I agree we're the best
@@R0DBS2 true
Semitic unity InshAllah
Never had a problem with smudging ink when writing in Hebrew/Arabic (maybe because I use mechanical pencils), I don't even rotate the page. What's nice about writing in English though is being able to read the line you're currently writing lol
I really really like this content...
Never had any problem writing in Arabic (or in French) as kid at school. The fact that Arabic is written right to left is only becomes a problem when you realize a certain text editor doesn't support RTL
Arabic is impossible to switch because why should we first and it is not necessary! lol
This helps me alot as I am creating a full history of Proto-Sinaitic scripts diagram.
بارك الله فيك يا اخي العزيز على هذا الشرح الرائع
Chinese was also written right to left before 1919, this also applied for other asian languages that used Chinese characters (Japanese, Hanja Korean, Pre-Latinized Vietnamese etc)
It was up to down, right to left.
Persian(Farsi) is also written right to left
Because farsi uses Arabic script.
Same with Urdu
Interestingly, Chinese was written from right to left originally. Some calligraphies on the wood above the front door now can still be seen written right to left. It seems to had been a preference thing which eventually became standardize.
my son is left handed and when he first started writing, he would often unthinkingly write in mirror script, right to left using his left hand. Once spotted, we encouraged him to avoid that since .. well... it doesn't match they way other people read and write. Seems to me then, handedness naturally favors a writing direction. So the interesting question to me is not "why was there a switch", but "why did writing start right to left in the first place?"
I think the stone chisel idea has merit as since you have to use two hands (right for the hammer and left for the chisel). the new writing is in between your hands, you can see your new product as your chisel hand moves to the left, the right hammer hand doesn't cover any script. so for a two handed operation, right to left makes sense. When writing on paper become dominant (or clay tablet-stylus), the left hand is not involved, the right hand covers the work in right to left but not left to right. I think it is as simple as that. Lefties be dammed.
3:17 is left to right writing just better?
the answer is OUI
لا يا صديقي العزيز.
مجاوبتش في الاخر بس فيديو جامد
فعلا
صحيح
I think that the reason for writing from right to left is that the ancients were sculpt the rocks for the formation of the gods or to develop guiding signs or drawing influential figures before the invention of the letters ...
Because the Arab region are desert the materials for the manufacture of ink supplies are not available,the writing used rocks in the beginning by virtue of they are experts in sculpture ...
So because the sculptor uses the right hand to the hammer and nail to the left , he must start from the right ,so they can see the place of nail and also to see the consistency of the word lines.
boustrophedon sounds like something you'd order at a French restaurant