the Wallace Line

[vincent]

Does this new theory actually add anything to the general understanding of the Wallace Line?

finance.yahoo.com/news/strange-invisible-line-always-run-181500448.html

[dennisw]

Geological upheavals are a likely contributor, but there other lines less well known. One that always intrigued me was that people west of Jerusalem write from left to right, but east of Jerusalem writing is from right to left. Is it political or has some other event created the variation?

[vincent]

... people west of Jerusalem write from left to right, but east of Jerusalem writing is from right to left.

Never heard of that one before. Off the top of my head, I can't imagine how that happened. I'm gonna guess that all the different empires which owned parts of Israel must have had a border between two empires which ran through Jerusalem, and the empire on one side wrote differently from the empire on the other side.

... there other lines less well known.

Northern Chinese speak Mandarin, and southern Chinese speak Cantonese, but all Chinese use the same characters to write the same words with their two separate pronunciations.

[johannes]

If the Italian league had destroyed Rome - rather than accepting that they had won, sort of, and got the Roman citizenship they had wanted in the first place - we would write from right to left, in Oscan letters:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_War_(91%E2%80%9387_BC)

[Ian Thomas]

That raises an interesting question. Which way did Trojans write?

Arms and the man I sing, who, forced by fate
And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate,
Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore.
poets.org/poem/aeneid-book-i-arms-and-man-i-sing

[johannes]

Ian Thomas wrote:

That raises an interesting question. Which way did Trojans write?

Cuneiform Luwian: Left to right,
Hieroglyphic Luwian: Boustrophedon (alternating between left to right and right to left from line to line),
Mycaenaean Greek (Linear B): Left to right.
Iron age Anatolian scripts (Lydian, Carian, Pisidian, Lycian etc.): Derived from Phoenician, so mostly right to left, later changed from left to right under Greek influence

[lurcherman]

Jul 26, 2023 22:18:07 GMT 10 vincent said:

... people west of Jerusalem write from left to right, but east of Jerusalem writing is from right to left.

Never heard of that one before. Off the top of my head, I can't imagine how that happened. I'm gonna guess that all the different empires which owned parts of Israel must have had a border between two empires which ran through Jerusalem, and the empire on one side wrote differently from the empire on the other side.

... there other lines less well known.

Northern Chinese speak Mandarin, and southern Chinese speak Cantonese, but all Chinese use the same characters to write the same words with their two separate pronunciations.

Read somewhere once that very early writing was boustrophedon, following the plough, alternate lines right to left and left to right. It seems probable, therefore, that when different peoples started to write in one direction it was probably 50:50 which direction they chose.