

Part of the "Tabun ǰuwan" (Five Tales) in Mongolian script. Nor are some of the traditional or historic scripts found in the Philippines (e.g., Batak) and Indonesia (e.g., Tagbanwa).Ī 19th century Mongolian novel, manuscript on native paper. Mongolian is written top to bottom, moving from left to right. Throughout Asia, we can find writing systems written in other directions. What other directions are languages written in? #Persian, #Pashto, and some other languages also use a modified Arabic alphabet. #Urdu uses a modified version of the #Arabic alphabet, with several additional letters for sounds of #SouthAsia not present in Arabic. Other languages that use right-to-left scripts (and often based on Arabic) include the writing systems of Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Rohingya, Fulani (in parts of Africa), and Divehi, in the Maldives. The Arabic alphabet has been adapted for a number of other languages, notably including Persian, Sindhi, and Urdu. Both of these are written from right to left. The Phoenician alphabet is also ultimately parent to the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets, via the Aramaic alphabet. What languages are written from right to left? Once English changed to the Latin alphabet, writing and reading direction changed too. So, how did English change from left to right?īy the end of the 1100s, the Latin alphabet-which is written left to right-had replaced writing in runes due to the spread of Roman Christianity throughout Europe. Runes are an ancient writing system whose origins are mysterious, but its earliest inscriptions run right to left. Old English was originally written in the runic alphabet, called futhark. Why is English written from left to right?
.jpg)
The Latin alphabet is principally descended from the Greek alphabet, in turn from the Phoenician alphabet and Egyptian hieroglyphs before it. Yet other languages, like Hindi, uses a script called Devanagari, which blends alphabetic and syllabic elements.Įnglish uses the Latin alphabet, which was used by the ancient Romans.

A logograph, also called a logogram, is a symbol that represents an entire word. Chinese uses a partly logographic and phonetic writing system. Japanese uses syllabic characters and characters based on Chinese. Many Native American languages, such as Cree, use a syllabary. Other languages employ what’s called a syllabary, where each symbol represents a syllable of a language. It began as pictographs-picture-like symbols representing objects-and evolved into the wedge-like cuneiform. One of the oldest writing systems dating back to around 3500 b.c.
