Subject: [b-hebrew] from right to left or from top to bottom?
Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 22:14:41 +0100
Hi,
I was brought up (so to speak, from university on) believing that
Hebrew was written and read from right to left. Although, I always
felt that Dr. Davila's explanation of how the letters of the Hebrew
alphabet evolved from pictures lacked something (does that beth really
look like a hous?).
Anyway, recently I've been broadening my research a lot and just
lately I've been looking a lot at the origins of writing throughout
the world. So, anyway, to get to the point take a quick look at the
table of characters on this wikipedia page:
So, looking at the second column in particular (the 'Phoenician'
column) and trying to reconcile that with the pictures in the first
column I noticed the following things:
1) The aleph looks a lot more like an oxes head if you turn it 90
degrees anti-clockwise
2) The beth looks a lot more like the frontal view of a flat roofed
ANE house if you turn it 90 degrees anti-clockwise
3) The zen looks a lot more like a set of primitive handcuffs if you
rotate it 90 degrees anti-clockwise (assuming that people in those
days had hands on the left and right rather than one on the head and
one in the tail)
4) The yad looks a lot more like the natural downward sloping position
of the human arm if you rotate it 90 degrees anti-clockwise
5) The mem looks like water falling down a waterfall if you turn it 90
degrees anti-clockwise
6) The nun looks a lot more like a snake on the ground if you rotate
it 90 degrees anti-clockwise
So anyway, my point is a lot of the characters make more sense if you
rotate them 90 degrees anti-clockwise and this led me to the following
question:
Was Hebrew written from top to bottom rather than from left to right?
i.e. taking any manuscript at random and turning it 90 degrees
anti-clockwise could not Hebrew be just as easily be understood as a
language that was written from top to bottom rather than from right to
left? Has this been suggested anywhere else before?
James
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The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
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[b-hebrew] from right to left or from top to bottom?,
James Read, 05/05/2009