In Boustrophedon, the trigger for changing direction is end of line, where
you reverse direction and descend a line. It actually makes sense for very
long lines, as Gerry noted. With abugidas (sorry - I let Arabic influence
my spelling) you jump back rather than snake around.

One symbol = one phoneme rarely actually applies to alphabets. In Greek,
alpha, iota and upsilon were applied indifferently to short and long vowels.
And in most of Western Europe, the principal was abandoned long ago.

Greek, Arabic and Hebrew are three different languages. Greek is written in
a heavily modified Phoenician script, e.g. by consisently using some letters
as vowels (Different versions of the same letter (waw) were used for /w/
(digamma) and /u/ (upsilon)).

Hebrew was written in Phoenician script but then switched to the Aramaic
script.

Arabic is written in Aramaic script with six extra letters. In the modern
form, these appear to have been made by adding a dot above the old letter.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerry Reinhart-Waller" <waluk@...>
To: <Nostratica@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2003 2:10 AM
Subject: Re: [Nostratica] Abujidas (was: Origin of the Sumerian language)



----- Original Message -----
From: Harald Hammarstrom
To: Nostratica@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, July 07, 2003 5:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Nostratica] Abujidas (was: Origin of the Sumerian language)



>>But to classify them according to this difference is arbitrary as far
as I can tell. To say that e.g fully vowellized Arabic or Hebrew or
devanagari for Sanskrit are different from alphabets because you have
to read the signs in a snake-like direction is like saying boustrophedon
Greek is not alphabetic writing because suddenly you have read in
another direction? >>


Dear Harold,

What you write is most interesting. Here's something I've discovered:

Boustrophedon (from Greek for ox-turning) is writing that proceeds in one
direction in one line (such as from left to right) and then in the reverse
direction in the next line (such as from right to left). Some ancient
languages, including one form of ancient Greek (650 BC), were written this
way. The term derives from the way one would plow land with an ox, turning
the ox back in the other direction at the end of a row. (It could be argued
that boustrophedon is a more efficient way to both write and read,
especially if your lines are very long.)
Some types of printers and their software print in this fashion (although
the results, of course, are lines that are read in only one direction).


Apparently many "languages" such as Greek proceed in one direction and
then shift to another path. Is this what Islamic and Hebrew actually do?
IOW, are they both the same language on represented in different script?

Gerry