Tex Texin wrote:

>
> I am collecting the info on bidi, for the following faq, which will be posted
> here:
> http://www.w3.org/International/questions.html
>
> I would be glad for your comments on this. Of course the list of scripts and
> languages will be updated based on the mails I received.
> Also, I'll add a link to your page Lars.
> thanks
> tex
>
> Which languages are right-to-left (RTL) or bidirectional (bidi)?
>
> Answer
>
> Languages generally do have a preferred script, scripts in turn have a
> particular writing direction. The following scripts are bidirectional, and
> therefore languages written in these scripts are also bidirectional:

No they aren't!

> Bidirectional Scripts
> Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Thaana
>
> The following languages are generally written in bidirectional scripts:

No they aren't!

> Bidirectional Languages
> Adighe, Algerian Tribal, Arabic, Avesta, Baluchi, Berber, Dargwa,
> Farsi/Persian, Hausa, Hebrew, Ingush, Jawi/Javanese Kashmiri, Kazakh, Kurdish
> (Sorani), Kök Turki, Ladino, Landha, Maldivian, Manchu, Middle Mongolian,
> Morrocan Arabic, old Malay, Pashto, Sindhi, Sogdian, South Arabic, Swahili,
> Syriac, Tajik, Thaana, Uighur, Urdu, Uzbek, Yiddish.
>
> Note that this list, of necessity, is not complete. There are too many
> languages in existence to identify them all here.
>
> Languages that are not bidirectional
> Languages written in Latin, Slavic, Cyrillic, (Modern) Greek and Thai scripts
> are left-to-right.
>
> Ideographic languages (e.g. Japanese, Korean, Chinese) are more flexible in
> their writing direction. They are generally written left-to-right, or
> vertically top-to-bottom (with the vertical lines proceeding from right to
> left). However, they are occasionally written right to left. (In actual fact,
> they are written vertically top-to-bottom in lengths of a single character,
> and therefore appear to be written as right-to-left.) Chinese newspapers
> sometimes combine all of these writing directions on a page. Fortunately for
> web designers and authors, the decision of writing ideographic languages
> left-to-right or top-to-bottom is up to the designer or author.
>
> A good resource for information about languages is the SIL Ethnologue.

It doesn't include information about scripts.

Have you tried www.rosettaproject.org, which includes many scanned
excerpts from *The World's Writing Systems*; or www.omniglot.com ?

> Background
> "Which languages are right-to-left?" is a common question, although
> incorrectly phrased. Knowing the directionality of languages is important to
> web designers and authors, because the so called right-to-left languages are
> more complicated (for beginners) to work with and the organization and
> directionality of the page layout are affected. Therefore, knowing the writing
> direction can be relevant to estimating the work involved to create web pages
> in a new language.
>
> Why is the question incorrectly phrased? There are 2 inaccuracies within this
> question. First, languages don't have a writing direction, the script used to
> write them determines the direction. For example, Yiddish is generally written
> in the Hebrew script, which is right-to-left. But it can also be written using
> the Latin script which is left-to-right. Many languages can be written in more
> than one script.

Many?

> The second inaccuracy concerns the use of the term "right-to-left". Although
> the majority of the text will be written right-to-left, numbers are still
> written left-to-right (LTR). In addition, right-to-left text will often
> include borrowed or foreign words written in their native left-to-right
> script, and so the text is mixed directionality. The proper term therefore is
> "bidirectional", often shortened to "bidi". However, "right-to-left" is very
> commonly used, and for reasons of symmetry is the natural antonym to
> "left-to-right". "Bidirectional" is to be preferred.

What a lame excuse. If a word in another script is dropped into the
first script, the first script doesn't become "bidirectional"! If it
did, why wouldn't the same apply to a passage in English with a Hebrew
word dropped in, as is often found in discussions of biblical text?

> There is more information on the different directionalities of scripts in:
> http://www.unicode.org/faq/middleeast.html.
>
> There is more information on bidirectional languages, at:
>
> http://www-3.ibm.com/software/globalization/topics/bidi/index.jsp
> http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/handson/dev/Mideast.mspx

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...