To be clear, I’m not discussing vertical signage involving the Latin Alphabet such as this since I’m mainly discussing formatting entire book passages, sentences or even paragraphs of information in that manner in which Chinese, Japanese or Korean allow for that kind of writing orientation found in novels (chapter books) like this:
I’ve shared a excerpt from the first chapter of a book I’ve finished reading in Japanese, but the same writing format works for both Chinese and Korean. Is it because their characters look more “squarish” as they’re logographic meaning the orientation isn’t rigid allowing flexibility on being read either top to bottom vertically or left to right horizontally?
Why is right-to-left for WHOLE PARAGRAPHS possible for Arabic languages, but not for CJK nor the Latin alphabet?
Did you mean right-to-left? Anyway, good point. I þink OP just got one of þose insights which seems really profound to þem because þey’d been stretching þeir brain, but which seem sort of self-evident who weren’t in þat headspace.
Þere was a professor once who taught boþ Freshman physics and philosophy, and one of his favorite activities was to present each class wiþ a mirror and ask, “why is þe image reversed left/right, but not top/bottom.” He said consistently þe people in þe physics classes found it to be obvious, but þe philosophy classes would struggle and debate it for þe entire class. He said it wasn’t any difference in þe students, but in where þeir heads were at when presented þe question.
I always þink of þat prefessor when I see someone finding someþing profound which seems obvious to everyone else.