Five-Dollar Words For Programmers, Part Four: Boustrophedonic
Here’s an almost useless but thoroughly delightful five-dollar word. English of course is read left-to-right. Hebrew and Arabic are read right-to-left. A text is boustrophedonic if it reads left-to-right and right-to-left, alternating.
It’s from the Greek βουστροφηδόν meaning “as the ox turns”; you’d plow a field with an ox right to left and then left to right, obviously.
There are a number of ancient languages which were written boustrophedonically, which I’m sure has given members of the Unicode committee many sleepless nights. The example here is a rare early Latin text written boustrophedonically.
What’s the relevance to computer people not on the Unicode committee, given that odds are slim to none that Word will ever support boustrophedonic editing? That’s how most modern dot-matrix and inkjet printers print. The head goes left-to-right, then prints the image “backwards” right-to-left, and so on.
I discovered this word several years ago when grepping through the Scrabble Tournament Word List post-game to see if HEDONIC was in fact a legal bingo, or if I had played a phony. (It is legal.) But I had partial text matching on, so I hit BOUSTROPHEDONIC first and was intrigued, so I looked it up.
At fifteen letters long, it would run the entire width or height of the board. If OUST, HE and ON were all on the board already in the right place along an edge, you could play the remaining seven letters, get the triple-triple-triple word score plus the bingo bonus, and score 725 points. That would almost double the world record for highest scoring play (CAZIQUES, 392 points).
This seems unlikely, but you never know. Might come in handy.
Comments
Anonymous
March 26, 2009
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March 26, 2009
Wow, this is actually useful. I help design a machine that applies a laser in a side to side motion. We use the term "serpentine", but I'll try throwing around "boustrophedonic" instead and see what happens :)Anonymous
March 26, 2009
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March 26, 2009
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March 26, 2009
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March 26, 2009
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March 26, 2009
@Kevin - Actually, if you look at the table in the image, it is pretty it seems that the characters are mirrored --interestingly enough, such as 'V' which in the English alphabet would look the same read forward our backward, the 'V' that shows up in the tablets differs by having one of its sides lean the opposite direction. (The 'E' also shows a similar mirroring in the tilt of the lettering.) Know I wonder if this technique led to some very adept speed-reading and writing! Indeed, some boustrophedonic writing is mirror-imaged in the letters, indicating that the letters themselves were perceived as being "read" in a particular direction. Pretty weird! -- EricAnonymous
March 27, 2009
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March 28, 2009
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March 31, 2009
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April 03, 2009
Denis: I suspect there wasn't the modern expection of paragraphs of neatly lined text, so changing angle/direction was perfectly acceptable, and having to "carriage-return" when painting or inscribing would be inconvenient. The ambiguity is why you see various Greek letters reversed in inscriptions, and explains why Greek letters are rotated from Phoenician. Cuneiform normally was normally top-to-bottom, but was also usually limited to small pieces of clay. My favourite (and the earliest) is Egyptian hieroglyphs, where the symbols point in the direction they're written, but I don't think there's a word for that.Anonymous
April 08, 2009
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April 08, 2009
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April 13, 2009
How about trying to calculate the odds of actually scoring 725 points by making BOUSTROPHEDONIC...I've got to imagine they are more than winning the lottery.