Which language is read from right to left. Why does everyone write from left to right, while Jews and Arabs write the other way around?

Have you ever wondered why the Hebrew and Arabic scripts have one distinct feature, namely writing from right to left? It turns out that there is a very practical explanation for this.

The fact is that Jewish and Arabic writing arose on the basis of ancient Babylonian cuneiform writing, and the Western tradition of writing - from ancient Egyptian papyrus writing.

To explain clearly what is the difference between them, let's turn on the imagination. Imagine that you have a papyrus in front of you, and you have a stylus (a thin knife) in your hands. We cut hieroglyphs with our right hand (85% of people are right-handed). At the same time, what is written to the right of us is closed, but what is clearly visible is what is on the left. The question arises: how do you prefer to write? Of course, from left to right, because it is so convenient to see what has already been written.

Now take a stone, a hammer and a chisel in your hands. Hammer in the right hand (85%), chisel - in the left. Let's start carving cuneiform hieroglyphs. The left hand with a chisel reliably covers what is written on the left, but what is on the right is clearly visible to us. How can we write better? In this case, right to left.

By the way, if you take a closer look at the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, you can see that their peculiar configuration indicates that the letters were originally carved on something solid. It is much easier to draw such letters with a chisel than with a pen.

Of course, since then the stone has ceased to be the only long-term custodian of information, but the rules of writing have already been formed, so it was decided not to change the rules of writing in a drastic way.

In the beginning was the word

About 4,000 years ago, people began to need to write, i.e. convey information to other people not by the spoken word, but by the written word. The first such attempts were pictograms, i.e. drawings. The writers of those times must have been very proud of themselves, but it is clear to us that their ability to describe qualities and emotions was meager.

drawing 01

The development of pictograms were hieroglyphs. In addition to drawings of objects, images appeared that carried descriptive information. Stable concepts were assigned to hieroglyphs, the number of such hieroglyphs grew. The inscriptions now consisted of hieroglyphs and pictograms.

drawing 02

Disadvantages of this letter:

1. There are over 500,000 words in any modern language. The need to memorize thousands of hieroglyphs is a task beyond the strength of the majority. The profession of a scribe / reader was respected and required many years of study, the common people were completely deprived of such an opportunity.

2. Each hieroglyph has meaning only within a certain group of people who have agreed on the meaning of this hieroglyph. A person not from this group will not understand this character, so the characters are not suitable for the exchange of information between groups of people.

They wrote in hieroglyphs in all directions, but the prevailing directions were from right to left and from top to bottom. The reason for this is simple: it is so convenient for the right-hander, who writes on the stone with a chisel in his left hand and a hammer in his right.

What I hear is what I write

In the middle of the 17th century. before. AD the family of the forefather Jacob migrates from Canaan (Canaan) to Egypt. Jews take an active part in economic and commercial activities - keeping records in hieroglyphs and pictograms was absolutely not suitable for solving such problems. Icons were invented with which it was possible to RECORD THE SOUNDS PRODUCED BY A HUMAN. This is how the first phonetic alphabet appeared.

At first, each character of this alphabet consisted of a combination of a consonant and a vowel, i.e. was an open syllable. Here is one version of the list of signs (not all are still understood):

drawing 03

There are 88 characters in this list. In fact, their number varies from 50 to 100 at different stages, in different places and by different researchers. As in modern times in almost all languages, each consonant could be combined with one of the 5 vowels to form an open syllable, for example:

Pa, Po, Pu, Pi, Pe.

In the photo we see an inscription made in the 16th century. BC. It was found in Egypt in the gorge of El-Khol (sand gorge) - this is the oldest found inscription written in the phonetic alphabet. This form of writing is today called linear writing, because, unlike previous forms of writing with hieroglyphs in all directions, it was written in a horizontal line.

drawing 04

El-Hol Gorge is located in Egypt about 500 km. upstream of the Nile River from the city of Cairo in the area of Jewish settlement in Egypt in the 16th century. BC.

drawing 05

Linear syllabic writing was improved during the 16th-14th centuries. BC. In the 13th century BC. a revolutionary leap took place in the development of this letter - more on that below.

After the overthrow in 1550 BC. XVI dynasty of the Hyksos pharaohs (hyksos, hycsos, Ὑκσώς, היקסוס) the attitude of the authorities and the local population towards the Jews became hostile (read the article ""). The emigration of Jews from Egypt to the regions of the Aegean, Crete, Cyprus, Sicily and other shores of the Mediterranean began.

drawing 06

Jews settled in these areas and, naturally, brought there a linear syllabary. Many documents written in versions of this letter have been found in excavations from the Minoan and Mycenaean periods.

drawing 07

In whatever language we write, the removal of vowels from words in most cases does not lead to misunderstanding of the text, but significantly shortens it. Let's try to write this sentence without vowels, leaving only vowels at the beginning and end of words and the vowel "o".

Let's try to use this proposition without glans bkv, leave the vowel only at the beginning and at the end of words and say "o". Ponchlu is a little strange, but if you try it, it's quite understandable.

Jews have been writing and reading this way for more than 3,000 years. The structure of Hebrew, in which almost all the roots of words consist of 3 consonants, greatly facilitates the task of understanding what is written. This way of writing saves time, paper, ink and develops variant thinking.

Having removed all unnecessary signs, the Jews by the end of the 13th century. BC, i.e. by the time the Exodus from Egypt began, they created an alphabet consisting of 22 letters. Here he is:

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Dear reader! Stop and think!!! Before your eyes the first phonetic alphabet, consisting of 22 letters - the greatest invention in human history. The invention of the wheel, gunpowder, penicillin and the internet are nothing compared to it. This is a universal means of disseminating information among people around the world. Without it, mankind would have practically stopped in its development 3,200 years ago.

This alphabet had the following revolutionary advantages:

1. he allowed to record ANY combination of sounds INDEPENDENTLY from the language of the speaker and did not even require an understanding of the meaning of what was said for this.

2. it was available to EVERYONE for study in a matter of days, i.e. opened the gates to literacy for the common people.

Exporting the alphabet to Europe

In 1194 - 1154. BC. the Jews make the Exodus - they leave Egypt and settle in Canaan.

In the next 450 years, immortal works were written in Hebrew using this alphabet, such as the Torah, the Psalms of King David, the Song of Songs and a great many others. What was the population of Europe doing while the Jews were learning to read and write, building Jerusalem and arguing about the foundations of morality laid down in the 10 commandments?

The Europeans of those times roamed the forests in skins, obtained food by gathering and primitive hunting, lived in caves, worshiped stones and lightning. It would continue like this, BUT...

In 732 BC Assyrian king Tiglath Pilaser III began his expansion into Canaan. The war lasted 31 years. During this period, the masses of the inhabitants of the kingdom of Israel left Canaan and, fleeing, settled on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

drawing 09

The total number of refugees was in the millions (read the article ""). A significant part of them settled on the islands and on the coast of the Aegean Sea. Thus ended the dark ages of Greece.

The settlers brought to the Aegean basin, among other things, the alphabet. Thus began the history of European writing.

Development of writing technologies

In the 7th - 5th centuries. BC. there was no paper. They wrote on clay, on papyrus, on the skin of animals.

The most convenient and promising was writing on specially treated animal skin. Leather processing technology has survived to this day. It is used to make a claf, on which the prayer "Hear, Israel" is written and embedded in a mezuzah. The same technology was used and is being used to make Torah scrolls.

The larger the piece of leather, the more information could be written on it and, therefore, the greater its value.

Reading from large pieces of leather had the drawback of the awkward need to move your head around while going from line to line. To overcome this inconvenience in the 6th - 5th centuries. BC. a tendency appeared and developed to change the direction of writing from line to line - a line from right to left, the next term from left to right, etc., for example:

figure 10

It is unusual for us, but after a minimum training it is quite acceptable.

For each character in the string, directionality is calculated;
The line is divided into blocks of the same direction;
The blocks are built in the order given by the base direction.

The directionality of each character is affected by its type and the directionality of neighboring characters.

Three types of characters

1) strongly directional(or strongly typed) - for example, letters. Their orientation is predetermined - for most characters it is LTR, for Arabic and Hebrew - RTL.

The words in the picture are entirely strongly typed:

2) Neutral- such as punctuation marks or spaces. Their direction is not set explicitly, they oriented in the same way as neighboring strongly directional symbols.

The comma between the left-to-right "o" and "w" in the string "Hello, world" takes on their directionality for both base LTR and RTL:

But what if a neutral directional symbol falls between two strongly directional symbols of different directions? Such a symbol takes on a basic orientation.

Here, the location of "++" in one case between the unidirectional "C" and "a", and in the other - between the oppositely directed "C" and the Arabic "و", leads to a different result:

The same happens with neutral characters at the end of a line:

3) Weakly directional(or weakly typed) - for example, numbers. They have their own direction, but do not affect the surrounding characters.

Continuous words of digits line up from left to right, but two numbers in a row separated by a neutral character will follow each other from right to left if the basic RTL directionality is set:

An even more obvious case is a number in which the digits are separated by a space:

In this case, it is allowed to separate numbers with a dot, comma, colon - these separators are also weakly directed (for more details, see the specification):

Directional blocks (directional run)

Sequential characters of the same direction are combined into blocks (directional run). These blocks line up one after the other in the order determined by the base direction:

Weakly directed numbers, despite the fact that they have their own direction, do not affect the formation of blocks, which can lead to such a result - they continue the previous directed block:

Mirror symbols

Some characters in different contexts have different shapes - for example, an opening bracket in RTL will look like a closing bracket in LTR (which is logical, because the content in brackets will come after - that is, to the left of it).

In most cases, this does not create problems, but if the brackets accidentally turn out to be in different directions, visually they will look in the same direction. For example, if the bracket hangs at the end of the line:

We take control

As we saw above, often the text according to these rules is not formatted the way we would like.

In this case, tools are useful to us for embedding the desired direction in the existing context or redefining the directions of specific symbols.

Insulation

We have already met with setting the base direction above: this is done by the dir attribute. This is a global attribute and applies to any element.

dir creates a new embedding level and isolates the content from the outer context. The content inside is directed according to the value of the attribute, and the outside directionality of the container itself becomes neutral.

Explicitly setting the dir attribute avoids almost all mixed text formatting problems:

أنا أحب C++ Java

If the direction of the content is not known in advance, you can specify auto as the value of the dir attribute. Then the direction of the content is determined with the help of "some heuristics" - it will simply be taken from the first strongly typed character that comes across.

(comment)

The tag works the same way. and css-rule unicode-bidi: isolate:

Landmark: (name)- (distance)

Embedding

You can open a new level of embedding without isolation - the unicode-bidi: embed rule in combination with the desired value of the direction rule determines both the direction inside the element and its direction outside. But this is almost never necessary in practice.

Override

or unicode-bidi:bidi-override; direction: rtl . Redefines the direction of each character within the element. It should be used extremely rarely (for example, if you need to swap two specific characters) and do not forget to isolate child elements.

Hello world!

At the same time, the element is interpreted from the outside as strongly directed. To make it behave like isolate on the outside, but like bidi-override on the inside, you need to use unicode-bidi: isolate-override .

Control characters (marks)

Inserting control characters is a nasty way, but it's useful when we don't have access to the markup, but we do have access to the content. For example, it could be just invisible strongly directional characters, ‎ and ‏ (‎ / ‏ or \u200e / \u200f). They help set the right direction for the neutral symbol.

For example, in this case, in order for the exclamation point at the end of the line to take the direction of LTR, you need it to be between two LTR characters:

Hello, world!‎

Also, any logic described above is implemented through control characters. For isolation - LRI / RLI, for redefinition - LRO / RLO, etc. See the detailed guide on control characters.

Browser Support

Unfortunately, in IE the tag , dir="auto" and their corresponding CSS rules are not supported. In addition, the specification of these rules is still at the Editor's Draft stage.

If you need an analogue of dir="auto" that works in any browser, you can parse the content with a regular expression and set the dir attribute yourself. But, of course, it's better not to.

HTML or CSS?

Definitely, you need to control the direction of the text, if possible, through the HTML dir attribute and the tag , not through CSS rules. Text direction is not styling, it's part of the content. The page can be inserted through some instant view or be read through an RSS-reader.

Before Conclusion: A Little Pain

We got to know the theory. But knowledge of the theory does not exempt from the need to suffer.

The main problem that I encountered in the very first minutes of development for the RTL language was its foreignness. We write code from left to right. My system, browser and editor work from left to right, all of our internal products work from left to right. Therefore, as soon as the Arabic language enters this space, everything is bad and painful:

Text manipulation

If the characters on the screen are not in the order they actually appear on the line, what happens if you try to edit bidirectional text? Or at least select and copy part of it?

Nothing good. Try it yourself:

Landmarks: دبي مارينا مول - 600 m, داماك العقارية - 1.2 km
azbycxdwevfugthsirjqkplom n

Code manipulation

And the same thing when editing the code in the editor and code review - a pain.

Even in the order of the elements in an array, one cannot be sure:

Or worse, the code doesn't look valid at all:

A friend of mine, after visiting Egypt, gave me his dialogue with another Russian tourist during an excursion to the pyramids. People who have been there know what it looks like: Arabs running around with whistles and chasing pyramid climbers away. After a short contemplation of this circus, a fellow traveler asked him "Do you believe that THESE could build such a thing? I - no." The friend agreed with him.

Nevertheless, every time I allow myself hard-hitting remarks about the Arabs, there is a person who reminds me that the positional number system that we use was invented by the Arabs and that is why the numbers are called "Arabic", in contrast to, for example, Roman .

However, these numbers were called Arabic by the Europeans, who borrowed them from the Arabs.

In the 12th century, Al-Khwarizmi's book "On the Indian Account" was translated into Latin and played a very important role in the development of European arithmetic and the introduction of Indo-Arabic numerals. ()

But in Arabic they are called "ar rakm al hindi", which means "Indian account". They are also called Indian in Iran: "Shumare ha ye hendi" in Farsi means "Indian numbers". We cannot know for sure whether the Arabs built the pyramids, but that they had nothing to do with the creation of the so-called "Arab" numbers is a reliable and generally accepted fact.

Indian numerals originated in India no later than the 5th century. At the same time, the concept of zero (shunya) was discovered and formalized, which made it possible to move on to the positional notation of numbers. Arabic and Indo-Arabic numerals are modified forms of Indian numerals adapted to Arabic writing. The Indian writing system was widely popularized by the scientist Al-Khwarizmi, the author of the famous work “Kitab al-jabr wal-l-muqabala”, from the name of which the term “algebra” originated. ()

But let's imagine that we do not have access to the Internet and books, or we do not believe what is written on Wikipedia. The fact that the Arabs simply took advantage of the result can be easily guessed even without knowing about the "Indian numbers". As you know, Arabs write from right to left. But at the same time, the writing of numbers occurs like most white peoples, from left to right. Therefore, if an Arab needs to write a number while writing, he has to retreat to the left, estimating how much space it will take, enter the number from left to right and then return back to writing from right to left. Take a sheet of paper and try to write the text from right to left and the numbers as usual, and you will understand what is meant. If you have to write quickly, then you can hastily underestimate the space needed for the number, and then it will be flattened towards the end.

The inscription in Arabic "Received the amount of 25976000 reais". The last three zeros did not fit in the indent and had to be added in small print on top.

A more educated opponent will immediately say that they say the achievement of the Arabs is not so much in the creation of a system of positional calculus, but in the creation of algebra, the progenitor of which is considered an outstanding Arabic(more on this below) mathematician Al-Khwarizmi. Of course, he is considered the creator of algebra not for the "Arabic" numbers, but for the work mentioned above, the book "Kitab al-jabr wal-muqabala". The word "al-jabr" in the name means "transfer", and the word "wa-l-mukbala" means "bringing". Transferring terms and bringing like ones are one of the main actions in solving equations. By the way, the word "algorithm" comes just from the name of Al-Khwarizmi - the Latin translation of his book began with the words "Dixit Algorizmi" (said Algorizmi).

Muhammad Al-Khwarizmi, (allegedly) Persian mathematician who labored under Arab occupation. The real image, of course, was not preserved, and for some reason the author decided to draw an Arabic beak-shaped nose to the scientist. (photo from here)

Wikipedia tells us that Al-Khwarizmi introduced a certain classification for linear and quadratic equations and described the rules for their solution. Methods for solving quadratic equations are beyond any doubt an achievement for that time. But only they were already known before him

One of the first known derivations of the formula for the roots of a quadratic equation belongs to the Indian scientist Brahmagupta (about 598); Brahmagupta outlined a universal rule for solving a quadratic equation reduced to canonical form ()

"Brahma-sphuta-siddhanta" ("Improved Teachings of Brahma", or "Revision of the Brahma System") is the most famous work of Brahmagupta, dedicated to mathematics and astronomy. The treatise is written in verse and contains only results without evidence. The work consists of 25 chapters (other sources mention 24 chapters and an appendix with tables). Chapter 18, "Atomizer", is directly related to algebra, but since such a term did not yet exist, it is named after the first problem considered in the chapter. ()

Maybe Al-Khwarizmi was not familiar with the works of Brahmagupta and rediscovered ways to solve quadratic equations?

In the second half of the 8th century, when the Baghdad caliph from the Abbasid dynasty Abu-l-Abbas Abd-Allah al-Mamun (712-775) was with an embassy in India, he invited a scholar from Ujjain named Kankah to Baghdad, who taught the Indian system of astronomy at based on the Brahma-sphuta-siddhanta. The caliph ordered a written translation of the book into Arabic, which was carried out by the mathematician and philosopher Ibrahim al-Fazari in 771. The translation, made in the form of tables - zija - with the necessary explanations and recommendations, was called "Great Sindhind". It is known that al-Khwarizmi used this work to write his works on astronomy (“Zij al-Khwarizmi”) and arithmetic (“The Book of the Indian Account”). ()

As you can see, Al-Khwarizmi was well acquainted with the book of Brahmagupta. Yes, he was undoubtedly a great scientist of his time, but by no means the founder of algebra. And if European mathematics received knowledge directly from India, and not through Baghdad, then algebra would now be called some kind of "brahmasphut".

Most likely, Al-Khwarizmi was not an Arab either. Why? Remember, we mentioned that in the Arabic writing system (from right to left), writing numbers from left to right looks very unnatural? Couldn't a great mathematician of his time have guessed that you can write numbers from right to left? Surely he could. Not even to hide the fact of borrowing, but simply for reasons of convenience. But he didn't. Why? Quite possibly intentionally, to leave obvious the fact that this is a foreign system, not an Arab one. It's like a message from the depths of time, they say, look people, the Arabs have nothing to do with numbers. Wikipedia partly confirms our guess.

There is very little information about the life of the scientist. Born presumably in Khiva in 783. In some sources, al-Khwarizmi is called "al-majusi", that is, a magician, from which it is concluded that he came from a family of Zoroastrian priests who later converted to Islam. ()

Zoroastrianism, which Wikipedia mentions, is not an ethnicity, but a religious one. It is clear that if the Al-Khwarizmi family professed Zoroastrianism, then he could not be an Arab. But who then? Zoroastrianism was practiced mainly by Persians, that is, most likely he was a Persian.

An even more sophisticated opponent may say that it was mentioned above that the Baghdad caliph al-Mamun ordered the translation of the book of Brahmagupta, which means he supported the development of science. So that the reader does not have false feelings on this subject, let's look at the history of Khorezm, the birthplace of Al-Khwarizmi.

In 712, Khorezm was conquered by the Arab commander Kuteiba ibn Muslim, who inflicted cruel reprisals on the Khorezmian aristocracy. Kuteiba brought down especially cruel repressions on the scientists of Khorezm. As al-Biruni writes in the Chronicles of Past Generations, “and by all means Kuteyba scattered and destroyed everyone who knew the writing of the Khorezmians, who kept their traditions, all the scientists that were among them, so that all this was covered with darkness and there is no true knowledge about what was known from their history at the time of the coming of Islam to them. ()

This is what the Arab invasion of the enlightened world represented - to cut out all the scientists, and for the few remaining to build a library in Baghdad.

Al-Khwarizmi was supposedly born in 783, that is, about 60 years after the arrival of the Arabs. Imagine that your homeland was captured by a tribe of nomads and your grandfathers tell stories in the evenings about how the invaders massacred your relatives. Apparently, Al-Khwarizmi quietly hated the Muslim occupiers, so he left the direction of writing numbers like that of the Hindus. Like, let the Arab animals suffer at least this way, writing texts from right to left, then from left to right.

What do we have in the dry residue? Arabic numerals are not Arabic at all, but Indian, and the pride of the Arab world, allegedly the founder of algebra, the mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, did not create algebra and most likely was not even an Arab.

How many more seemingly banal questions that are literally constantly in front of our eyes. However, we never tried to find answers to them because we did not notice this question - we got used to it. But often such questions hide interesting, deep and sometimes simply elegant answers.

Have you ever wondered why the Hebrew and Arabic scripts have one distinct feature, namely writing from right to left? It turns out that there is a very practical explanation for this.

The Semitic languages, which include both Arabic and Hebrew, are among the oldest on the planet. They originated at a time when no one could even dream of paper, because it appeared only about two thousand years ago. Hebrew and Arabic writing developed from ancient Babylonian cuneiform writing, and the Western tradition of writing from ancient Egyptian papyrus writing.

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