Linguistics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professional linguists and others with an interest in linguistic research and theory. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Did a writing system ever develop that had a bi-directional writing style, alternating every line, with character orientation and order being preserved between lines? (Essentially Boustrophedon, without changing the orientation or word order of letters each line)
A hypothetical example of this writing system, would be the following:
"The quick brown fox
".dog lazy the over jumps
(Reading L-R in Ln 1, then R-L in Ln 2)
This is a quite high level "no" answer. All boustrophedon like writing systems I have ever seen in practice are of two types:
When the writing system is alphabetic or syllabic (with multisyllabic words), the order of letters or syllables is in general "as they are heard/read".
Everything beyond that is reaching into the realm of weak cryptography (permutation codes).
I have several books on writing systems of the world (e.g. Jensen: Die Schrift; Haarmann: Universalgeschichte der Schrift) and none of them mentions any boustrophedon-like writing system where the glyphs don't adapt to the current reading/writing direction.
