English is read from left to right. This works well for right handed people who write with their right hand and don’t end up getting pen ink all over their hands like lefties do because you move your hand over the words you just wrote. Maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, we read from left to right. When you get to the end of a line, you look back to the left side of the page or column and go down a line and start reading again.
Wouldn’t it be way quicker to alternate reading direction for each line?
If you can read two languages and one was written left to right and one right to left you could write every other line of text in the alternate-reading-direction language and then read by scanning right, then going down a line and scanning left and so on.
Wouldn’t that be neat? I can’t read two languages so I don’t know how hard it would be to switch language contexts, but it is pretty clear that having a language that could be written in both directions and convey the same meaning regardless of which direction you were reading in would be way more efficient.
Given the zillions of languages that have existed throughout humanity, I wonder why (or maybe if) a language was never/ever created that could do this.
Some languages I know are written vertically, but I don’t think they read down and up, just down.
I guess languages with one-character-per-concept glyphs would make this easier to do, but apparently humans have worked out that multiple-letters-per-concept/word works better.
All interesting ideas…
Apparently there’s a word for this: boustrophedon, from Greek: “as the ox turns while plowing”