Directionality in reading text

Unquestioned Bias in Governance from Direction of Reading? (Part #2)

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It is curious to recognize how little attention is given to directionality in reading any text or music score -- and performing the music in the latter case. Mozart even challenged this by composing a piece that can be played in either direction -- a musical palindrome -- a duet that can be played with one player reading the music right-side-up, and another reading from upside-down. Nicknamed the "Palindrome", Haydn's Symphony No. 47, the third movement is a musical palindrome; the second half of the piece is the same as the first but backwards. Other examples are indicated by Wikipedia. In classical music, a crab canon is a canon in which one line of the melody is reversed in time and pitch from the other. A large-scale musical palindrome covering more than one movement is called "chiasic"

It is therefore useful to consider the possible directions of reading, and especially the manner in which they are preferred in different cultures -- or at different periods of time. These variants may suggest significant strategic insights, especially since so much is strongly associated with "left" and "right" in politics, with those preferring one or the other seeking by every means to shift others to their sense of appropriate directionality. As the online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages, a checklist of writing/reading directions for an extensive range of scripts is presented by Omniglot (Writing Direction Index).

A highly relevant focus on the matter has been provided by Anne Maass (Living in an Asymmetrical World: how writing direction affects thought and action, 2014). Bridging five decades of research on horizontal bias related to writing direction, this notes:

There has recently been a renewed interest in the role of spatial dimensions in social cognition, and how vertical and horizontal trajectories are used to represent social concepts such as power, agency, aggression, and dominance. Most of this work surrounds the idea that abstract concepts are intrinsically linked to our sensory and motor experiences, including habitual interactions with the environment such as reading and writing.

The pattern of directionality in script reading may well be summarized in tabular form (as below). Attention is primarily given to the 4 colured modalities in the table -- notably that coded red -- namely reading from left-to-right (LTR), starting from the top and reading down (as with Sanskrit). This is characteristic of many scripts dating from that of Greece. By contrast, right-to-left, top-to-bottom (RTL) script -- coded green in the table -- is characteristic of Arabic script, Hebrew and Persian (all written from top-to-bottom of the page). Books in such cases may then be said to be read from "back-to-front".

Many East Asian scripts (notably including Chinese and Japanese) can be written horizontally or vertically -- allowing for directional flexibility, be it horizontally from left-to-right, horizontally from right-to-left, vertically from right-to-left, and even vertically from bottom-to-top. These patterns are primarily associated with the other coded zones in the table.

Traditionally, Chinese was written in vertical columns with the text starting in the top right corner of the page, running down and then moving leftwars across the page. More recently Chinese is using the RTL direction pattern, written in rows starting from the top left corner of the page, from left to right and down the page. Chinese can therefore be written from right-to-left in vertical columns, left-to-right in horizontal lines, or occasionally right-to-left in horizontal lines. In Taiwan it is often written vertically, while in China and Singapore it is usually written horizontally.

The table includes the less common possibility of the boustrophedon, namely a pattern in which the direction of reading is reversed at the end of every line -- a form of bidirectionality. This was characteristic of some occasional writing in Ancient Greece and Latin (particularly in religious inscriptions) -- reading top-down. Clearly there is also the possibility of reverse directions, whether starting at the right, or starting at the bottom. This pattern could also be applied to vertical reading. The table therefore offers 16 "reading modalities", potentially suggestive of preferences in governance and politics.

Varieties of directionality in reading -- and in politics? ("both" indicates bidirectionality)

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