At 04:37 PM 8/18/2005, Stephen Deach wrote: >Mongolian was originally written as RL-TB in an Aramaic-derivative script. > >Then the whole page was rotated 90-deg CCW (glyphs and layout are simply >rotated from the original form). This is essentially its current vertical >writing form TB-LR. > >-- Now comes the wierd part. Small snippets of horizontal text are now >written LTR with glyphs inverted 180-degrees from the original form. > >So yes, it is currently laid out LTR, but it is really written as if it >was RTL-inverted. To be more precise, the Sogdian script from which Mongolian is derived has been rotated 180 degrees so that that script is now upside down. Since most of the historical use of the Mongolian script seems to be in its vertical form, the LTR form of Mongolian is only a 90 degree rotation from the historical usage. The following is pure conjecture, but I suspect the LTR use of the Mongolian script came about when Traditional Mongolian Script was included in Cyrillac Mongolian texts. I certainly have examples of Mongolian texts that combine both Cyrillac Mongolian and traditional Mongolian in the LTR from. These texts also show that the Sogdian script has been rotated 180 degrees in the LTR form as noted above. It is the 180 degree rotation of the script that converted what is a RTL script to and LTR script just as one would expect from the embeddings of rotated Roman and Arabic scripts in vertical documents. For example, Arabic rotated 90 degrees counter clock-wise becomes top to bottom (and when it is rotated 90 degree clockwise it becomes a bottom to top script). >At 2005.08.16-04:35(-0400), fantasai wrote: >>Stephen Deach wrote: >>>I would like to see your list of languages using RTL scripts. >>>The only scripts identified as RTL in Unicode are Arabic and Hebrew. >>>(Then there is the strange case of Mongolian which is marked as LTR but >>>I think should be treated as "RTL rotated to read top-down".) >> >>Mongolian is LTR because when it goes horizontal for brief spans, it is >>usually LTR. (Probably because most scripts out there are LTR.) Longer >>texts are always laid out vertically, in which case Mongolian has the >>same directionality behavior as CJK. >> >>~fantasai > > >---Steve Deach > sdeach@adobe.com Steve ===================================== Steve Zilles 115 Lansberry Court, Los Gatos, CA 95032-4710 steve@zilles.orgReceived on Friday, 19 August 2005 20:14:57 GMT
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