And there are a rare few instances of writing systems that alternate left-to-right and right-to-left on each line
I know a language which kinda-sorta has two writing systems, one of which is left-to-right, the other one right-to-left.
Which one?
I don’t know which one HK65 is referring to, but I know a few examples:
- Punjabi, which is left-to-right in India and right-to-left in Pakistan (the Indian one being influenced by older Indian scripts and the Pakistani one by Arabic)
- Kazakh uses the RtL Arabic script in the part of China where there are a lot of Kazakhs and the LtR Cyrillic script in Kazakhstan
- At least some of the kinds of Tamazight (spoken by Amazigh people, mostly in Morocco and Algeria) use Arabic script, but there is a script specifically for Tamazight languages called Tifinagh which goes left to right and there’s also some use of the Latin alphabet for these languages
Now that I think about it: Yiddish is traditionally written in Hebrew script but also in Latin. I don’t know if the Latin is “just” a transliteration but I think both are standardized (which wouldn’t mean it’s not a transliteration)
I couldn’t say much about it myself, but with it being a Germanic language influenced by Hebrew that would make sense
Hungarian
Granted, the right-to-left thing is not used anymore outside of enthusiast circles, and is kind of an anachronism and part of a movement to revive it as part of national heritage. That said, you can find a whole bunch of town limit marker signs in both scripts around the country.
The Hungarians settled the Carpathian Basin in 895. After the establishment of the Christian Hungarian kingdom, the old writing system was partly forced out of use during the rule of King Stephen, and the Latin alphabet was adopted. However, among some professions (e.g. shepherds who used a “rovás-stick” to officially track the number of animals) and in Transylvania, the script has remained in use by the Székely Magyars, giving its Hungarian name (székely) rovásírás. The writing could also be found in churches, such as that in the commune of Atid.
From Wikipedia