#boustrophedon

[crawfishcomic]

I drew this when I was 9, it was destiny. You're meant to read this in a zigzag, starting left to right.

[verdantachillean]

I would love a boustrophedon font that would be cool, I want to strike fear in the hearts of the other social media apps!!!!

[coffeenewstom]

Kretisches Kaffeetagebuch: der Gesetzeskodex von Gortyn

“In der Zeit der Hochblüte minoischer Kulturen stand im Süden Zentralkretas, in der Messará, alles im Schatten des Palastes von Festós. Górtis erwachte erst zu eigenem Leben, nachdem die großen minoischen Lebenszentren ausgelöscht waren und die Dorier die Macht übernommen hatten. (…) Bis es dann 67. v. Chr. zusammen mit der übrigen Insel in römische Hände fiel. Im Gesamtplan des römischen…

[qupritsuvwix]

Plowing with language…

[max1461]

It would actually be more efficient if we wrote in boustrophedon

llɒ ƨɘγɘ ɿuo ɘvom oɟ ϱnivɒ⑁ ʇo ɘmiɟ ɘ⑁ɟ ƨu ɘvɒƨ bluow ɟi ɘƨuɒɔɘd

the way back to the left before starting each new line. Imagine how

qu bɘbbɒ ɘɿɘw ƨϱnivɒƨ ɘƨo⑁ɟ llɒ nɘ⑁w ɘvɒƨ bluoɔ ɘw ɘmiɟ ⑁ɔum

[mmmmalo]

"When the Greeks began to use the Phoenician gimel in their writing, they took liberties with the original character design. First, the long arm was made vertical so that the letter resembled an upside-down capital ‘L’ with the arm extending to the left. Then they reversed the letter so that the short stroke was on the right side. This design reversal was not uncommon with the Greek versions of Phoenician letters. The early Greeks wrote boustrophedonically, meaning “turning like oxen in plowing.” (Alternate lines were written in opposite directions.) In this technique, non-symmetrical letters were reversed in alternate lines of writing. By the sixth century BC, the style had been dropped in favor of the current practice of writing and reading from left to right, but by that time many letters were permanently inverted from their Phoenician design."

- Allen Haley (x)

[fishpondfish]

there's a line in this song that goes "and the planes fly boustrophedon, in and out" and that was my first time ever hearing that word (it's when text is written from right to left and from left to right in alternate lines lololol) and it's my favorite thing ever because it's sooo unnecessary. like the "she don't got a single song where she needs to be doing all this" meme but instead There's not a single song where Anybody ever needs to be saying the word boustrophedon. And yet. they did. and i Love that

[amamaterial]

Le Boustrophedon de Nuit au Couvent de la Tourette

Nathalie Cornevin (harpe) – Soizic Lebrat (violoncelle) – Seb Brun (batterie, électronique) – Le Troglographe (Pierre Constantin : dessins musicaux, Guillaume Lavergne : piano, Castor Morse : gong préparé, synthé granulaire) – Lê Quan Ninh (percussion) 

et avons abdiqué pour le suivant et dernier.

Bon ce fut assez merveilleux. (mais je suis un peu dubitative sur l'exercice... je suis capable de rester éveillée toute la nuit pour danser comme une débile sur de la techno ou m'exploser les oreilles sur de la noise, mais je regrette de n'avoir pas eu l'écoute suffisamment alerte pour Lê Quan Ninh qui est un peu mon parangon de la musique improvisée et que j'ai n'ai que trop peu vu )

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

no punctuation we read like romans

[keen2meecha]

Instead of writing like I'm supposed to I just created a fantasy alphabet 🧍

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Some Linguistics Vocabulary

Accidental gaps - nonoccurring but possible forms of a language

Boustrophedon - the practice of reversing the direction of writing at the end of each line, which was typical of many old writing systems

Contour tones - tones that change pitch on a single syllable

Endangered language - language that is falling out of use and is likely to become extinct

Fuzzy concepts - concepts that do not have clear-cut boundaries that distinguish them from other concepts (e.g., the concept poor)

Isolate - a language that is not known to be related to any other living language (e.g., Basque, Kutenai)

Lingua franca - a language that is used when speakers of two or more different languages come into contact and do not know each other's languages

Markedness - the quality of being relatively complex or rare in world languages

Motherese - (or caregiver speech) the type of speech that is typically addressed to young children

Polysemy - the situation in which a word has two or more related meanings

Saccades - the quick and uneven movements of the eyes during reading

Spoonerisms - a type of speech error in which words or sounds are rearranged with often humorous results

Topicalization - the process by which the topic of a sentence is moved to the front of the sentence (e.g., "vanilla pudding I like")

Weakening of meaning - the process in which the meaning of a word has less force (e.g., soon used to mean "immediately" but now means "in the near future")

Word - the smallest free form found in language

Source ⚜ More: Notes & References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[tanadrin]

in my new programming language:

whitespace--including line breaks and space characters--is forbidden

arrays are indexed starting at -1. they still go up, btw. they just start at -1.

multi-dimensional arrays are indexes boustrophedon-style. every other row is indexed in the opposite direction.

to keep file sizes down, there are no comments

not only do you need a header file for every class declaring variables and functions, you need a footer file with a statement explaining how this class complies with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995.

to encourage concise code, variables are limited to two letters. the first letter determines the type, and the second letter must be unique. also, you are limited to 256 variables at one time, because nobody really needs more than that.

the compiler will attempt to guess whether the value you have typed is decimal, hexidecimal, binary, etc. you may not provide any hints. it needs to do this on its own, for personal growth reasons.

[official-linguistics-post]

I know about the blustrophedon (I probably spelt something wrong) writing, the one that goes left to right and right to left in the next line, but is there any writing system that does this but up and down instead? As in, imagine some language, it goes from up to down when you start writing, but what if when you reach the bottom instead of moving up again you could do the same as the boustrophedon and write the letters to the other side (like a mirror if it was normal, but now they're upside down since you started from up to down), then when you reach the top you shift again and write normally? And if so, or even if it doesn't exist, how hard would it be to read? Would a native speaker do it easily since it's the first language? I hope it made sense and that you can help!

i'm not aware of any vertical boustrophedon, although it could well be an incidental phenomenon in vertically-arranged scripts that otherwise read in one direction. i imagine that the difficulty would be comparable to horizontal boustrophedon, assuming basic reading competency, so not impossible but taking some practice to accomplish fluently.

fun fact: "boustrophedon" means "like an ox turning" because it resembles the continuous path of plowing a field!

[inthefallofasparrow]

BALDERDASH #7

[schleyer]

just misread placeholder as boustrophedon i think @msburgundy is right i belong in a home

[mentaltimetraveller]

Kim Dickey, Boustrophedon, 2024, glazed stoneware, 24 3⁄4 × 7 1⁄2 × 7 1⁄2″.