In an previous post,
I expressed fascination that writing could go in any possible direction. I began with Swift, who satirized both "women" and the
English when he described the fanciful Lilliputian script: "their
manner of Writing is very
peculiar, being neither from the Left to the Right, like the Europeans;
nor from the Right to the Left, like the Arabians; nor from up to down,
like the Chinese; nor from down to up, like the Cascagians; but
aslant from one Corner of the Paper to the other, like Ladies in
England."
To Swift's curious catalog (the Cascagians are of course his own
invention), I added boustrophedon, a system that Swift did not know
but one that would surely have delighted him.
In boustrophedon (a lovely
Greekish word that signifies "turn like an ox plowing"), alternate
lines move in opposite directions. Lines one, three, five and seven
and so on proceed from left to right; lines two, four, six, and eight
from right to left. Ancient languages such as Safaitic were written in
boustrophedon; some Etruscan inscriptions, still undeciphered, seem to follow
the same pattern.
Boustrophedon is not
unreasonable, but it's certainly awkward for those of us who have made a
fetish of left to right. Here's how Shakespeare transforms
boustrophedonically. The passage takes a bit of effort to read but it's certainly intelligible.
It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,—
!srats etsahc uoy, uoy ot ti eman ton em teL
It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood;
,wons naht sreh fo niks retihw taht racs roN
And smooth as monumental alabaster.
.nem erom yarteb ll'ehs esle, eid tsum ehs teY.
Right, left, up, down, aslant, and back and forth might seem to have
exhausted the possible formats. But such is not the case. Rongorongo,
the language of Easter Island, is written in still another style, that
of "reverse boustrophedon." In Lost Languages (2002), Andrew Robinson describes how this most peculiar system works.
"To read a Rongorongo tablet, one started at the bottom left-hand
corner and read along line 1 to the right-hand corner. Then one turned
the tablet through 180 degrees and began reading line 2 from left to
right again, At the end of line 2, one repeated the 180-degree turn so
that the tablet was in the same orientation as at the beginning, and
read line 3 from left to right and so on.... Every even-number line is
written back-to-front and upside-down in relation to an ordinary
English text."
I don't believe that even Jonathan Swift could have invented a
manner of composition so counter-intuitive, so odd. But then, those
Easter Islanders (or, more properly, Rapanui) danced to a drummer who
is uniquely their own. I don't believe that there's a second reverse
boustrophedonesque culture anywhere on the planet.
Is that all? Are there no other possibilities? Yes indeed, there's also the phaistos disc,
which (according to Andrew Robinson once again), "was discovered in
1908 by Luigi Pernier in the ruins of a palace at Phaistos in southern
Crete. The archeological context suggests that the date of the disc is
1850-1600 BC. The disc is 6.5 inches in diameter and .75 inches thick
and is made of fine clay. On both sides is an inscription which
consists of characters impressed on the wet clay with a punch or stamp
before it was fired. They are arranged in a spiral around the center of each side.
The
writing begins at the outermost circle and works its roundabout way
towards the center, which means either that the scribe knew exactly how
many letters (or ideographs, or syllables) he intended to use, or that
he started at the center and wrote backwards until he reached the
circumference of the disc. Neither method is particularly convenient
or flexible, so it's not surprising that spiral writing never caught
on. It certainly wouldn't do for people like me who revise heavily.
The phaistos disc cannot be translated.