What word describes languages that are written left-to-right, top-to-bottom?
I am trying to describe the set of languages that, like English, are written left to right, and was trying "romanized", but "romanized" describes transliteration to a different set of characters, such as taking the Japanese word 着物 and writing it as kimono in English.
Unfortunately, when I enter "left to right" in a Google query, it finds me all the pages with "right to left" in them, which is of course the opposite of what I'm looking for.
Solution 1:
They're simply referred to simply as as left-to-right or left-to-right, horizontal (e.g. English, Greek).
The opposite is right-to-left, or right-to-left, horizontal (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew).
LTR and RTL are also used as abbreviations.
There's a third class which do have a good name: boustrophedon. These alternate left-to-right then right-to-left. The name comes from the Greek for ox and turn, because it resembles an ox pulling a plough. Another name is plough-wise.
And these are just the horizontal writing systems. Here's some others, listed by Omniglot:
- Left to right, vertical, top to bottom
- Right to left, vertical, top to bottom
- Left to right, vertical, bottom to top
- Right to left, vertical, bottom to top
- Variable
Solution 2:
I had a hard time finding anything and had to settle for using the abbreviations, RTL (right to left) and TTB (top to bottom).
Normal Google didn't return anything useful using ["left to right" -"right-to-left], neither did Google Scholar, although there are some quite nice papers on the effect of writing direction on the mind.
If this is academic writing, try to stick what the others in the field have been using, what I have found in this article, is that the author sticks to just using "left to right" and "right to left", so without any specific term.
If anyone is able to find a source for a more specific word, I would be very interested.
Solution 3:
I had the same problem once when I compared Arabic letters and Latin letters in order to see whether there was a relationship and, of course, I wanted an adjective. At last I used rechtsläufig and linksläufig in German, that would be right-running and left-running scripts. But I think the abbreviations rtl-/ltr-scripts will do as well.