At 12:02 PM 7/11/97 Johnk wrote:
>>I thought Hebrew was "bidirectional".
>Technically, "bidi" has been used to refer to the ability to process
>both right-to-left (e.g., Hebrew and Arabic) and left-to-right
>languages. I am unaware of any living language that is written
>bidirectionally in the sense of boustrophedon.
You're right about the lack of boustrophedon these days, but Hebrew,
Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, etc. are bidirectional because alphabetic text
reads from right-to-left, while numbers contained in that text read
from left to right, in accordance with numbers in LTR languages. So if
you're reading scientific or financial text with lots of numbers in
it, you'll toggle between RTL and LTR quite a bit.
Siobhan Harper-Jones
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