Writing systems that do not preserve spoken order

Question

Are there writing systems where there are cases of written form of words not preserving the order of speech, i.e. text(A) precedes text(B) in the written form, but speech(B) precedes speech(A)?

Only words written in the native script(s) should be considered: semiotics such as "$10" which is read as "10 dollars" are excluded explicitly.

And of course the distinction between LTR/RTL doesn't matter here, as the ordering here would be defined to be the respsective direction of each writing system.

Answer 1

Hieroglyphic Egyptian has a feature called "honorific transposition", where certain nouns can be written at the beginning of a noun phrase (regardless of their actual syntactic position) if they're more important than all the other nouns.

For example, one type of priest is called a ħm-nṯr, "servant of the god". Grammatically, in this construction, the "owner" noun (nomen regens) needs to come second, and its Coptic descendant is hont. But since "god" is clearly more important than "servant", it's written orthographically as nṯr-ħm.

This mostly only happens with words relating to deities ("god", "pharaoh", names of gods, etc), but during certain periods it was also common to transpose a father's name in front of a child's name. The scribe who wrote the best-surviving copy of the Shipwrecked Sailor, for example, recorded his name as jmny zꜣ jmnꜥꜣ, literally "Amoni, son of Amona'a" ("owner" noun coming second as above). But depending on the time period, this could instead be read as jmnꜥꜣ zꜣ jmny, "Amona'a, son of Amoni". Google says the papyrus is from the 12th dynasty, so I think it's the latter; transposing the father's name was common in that era.

There were also sometimes "aesthetic transpositions", where the graphemes were rearranged for purely aesthetic reasons. Variant spellings of the word for "in front of" demonstrate that it should be pronounced ḫft. However, the glyphs for ḫ and t are small, and f is long and flat, so arranging them in this order tends not to look good. Instead, it's most commonly written ḫtf, so that the two small signs can be arranged over the flat one.

Answer 2

There is a whole class of languages that use Abugida writing system which shows this phenomenon on a regular basis. Most prominent examples are Hindi and Thai.

Using Thai writing for examples below.

No final (CV):

• เ◌ + ม = เม /e+m/ = /me/
• โ◌ + ม = โม /o+m/ = /mo/
• ไ◌ + ม = ไม /ai+m/ = /mai/

With Final (CVC):

• เ◌ + ม + ม = เมม /e+m+m/ = /mem/
• โ◌ + ม + ม = โมม /o+m+m/ = /mom/

Di- and triphthongs are pronounced in order different to the order of character appearance:

• เ◌ + ต + ◌ี + ย + ง = เตียง (bed) /e+t+ii+j+ng/ = /tiang/

A more complex example demonstrating epenthesis (svarabhakti):

• เ◌ + ส + ม + อ = เสมอ (forever) /e+s+m+_/ = /sa-mer/
• เ◌ + ฉ + ล + ◌ี + ย + ง = เฉลียง (corridor; hall) /e+ch+l+ii+j+ng/ = /cha-liang/ (compare to the เตียง example above).

Answer 3

German numbers.

42 is read as "Zweiundvierzig", literally "Two and Forty".
This order swap only happens for numbers between 20-100.

Answer 4

Sumerian cuneiform has certain fossilized transpositions, where a sequence of signs got re-analyzed as a single logogram and then did not change when the syntax of the language changed.

For example, it seems that adjectives used to precede the nouns they modify in Sumerian, but this order became archaic and eventually died out by the Ur III period: earlier gal-niŋir "chief herald", later niŋir-gal. But a few of these early compounds fossilized in writing, and later lú-gal "king" remained written GAL.LÚ. (Likewise ušum-gal "dragon" remains written GAL.UŠUM.) We know that the pronunciations were lú-gal and ušum-gal based on Akkadian glosses and phonological properties ("of the king" is written GAL.LÚ-la, for example, showing that the stem ends with an L), but the "inverted" spellings survived into Akkadian and Hittite, where the native words for "king" are still written with the logogram GAL.LÚ.

Answer 5

Japanese was once written as Chinese, with markers to indicate how the characters should be reorganised to Japanese grammar. This style of writing is called kanbun. The Chinese characters are written as they would be in China, with numerals and other markers written between them to indicate the order in which they should be read.

Answer 6

English (in particular British English) does this more or less systematically, when a final e is preceded by certain consonant combinations. The e appears in pronunciation before the consonant or changes the pronunciation of vowels before the consonant:

• apple → /æpəl/
• subtle → /sʌtəl/
• centre → /sentəɹ/
• gape → /ɡeɪp/ (contrast with gap)

Answer 7

Hebrew consists of syllables, with a vowel (which may be silent) after each consonant (which may also be silent). A reversal happens in the case of a pasach (approximately as English far) when combined with one of the guttural consonants, aleph (which is silent), mappiq (pronounced) hey, ches (as in Scottish loch), or ʿayin (⟨ʕ⟩), at the very end of a word. There, the consonant-vowel combination is pronounced in reverse.

For example is the Biblical name Noah which more correctly would be spelled Noach since the final consonant is ches. The Hebrew literally spells out No-cha, but the pronunciation of the ches-with-pasach cluster is reversed to ach.

Answer 8

As you have discovered from the answers, writing systems do not exactly submit to a strict ordering of elements. In Devanagari writing, elements can overlap: there are "ligatures", many of which are illustrated on this page. For example, the consonant elements of the ligature kva, kla and in general rCa for any consonant overlap in left-to-right order. Vowel in Devanagari are mixed, but none of them strictly precede or strictly follow, they all overlap the consonant to some extent (pi=पि, pi:=पी). A few "mostly" follow or "mostly" precede (when they have a "stick"), but the general pattern is that vowels overlap the consonant mark (pu=पु). The "exception" is that certain long vowels have a stick that hosts the vowel marker, so that the mark for "a:" entirely follows the consonant (pa:=पा) since short a doesn't have a vowel mark. Thus in pe:=पे there is (mostly) overlap because the mark for "e" doesn't sit on a stick, but in po:=पो, there is just "some overlap" with p, because the mark (basically the same thing as the mark for "e") is on a stick.

Korean Hangul likewise does not easily submit to a strict left-right ordering analysis: instead, each syllable is a "box" and you position the consonants and vowels depending on whether the element is onset, nucleus or coda. The coda is "below", so it overlaps the onset and nucleus.

Answer 9

Some numbers in English (and some numbers of other European languages)

13 is Thirteen, literally meaning Three and Ten. Though the example is not as nice as @Thomas' example for German.

This is not unique to English. In Italian we have:

13 is tredici, literally meaning Three (tre) and Ten (dieci), as well.

Answer 10

In the Devanagari script, the sign for a short i precedes the consonant it follow in the spoken language, the syllable ki is written कि, while the syllable kī with long i is written की. Of course you can interpret this in different ways (e.g., as a diacritic) but the fact remains that at least on a Devanagi typewriter, the short i is produced before the consonant.

Answer 11

1. Tones (e.g. in Chinese) are often indicated by a symbol after the syllable, but the tone apples to the preceding nucleus. This is especially visible in Wade–Giles, where the tone is a superscript number (syllable-final consonants are rare in Mandarin, but there are some), e.g. Wei¹ Chai² Shih⁴ P'in¹-yin¹.
2. Many languages change the pitch to indicate questions, this is marked in writing by a question mark placed after the clause (Spanish and Armenian being two major exceptions).