> > >Markus Kuhn wrote: > >>Does anyone know of any other examples or successful major script >>reforms (apart from the semi-successful Soviet attempts to force all >>their republics to switch to cyrillic)? >>
Prior to World War II, Japanese horizontal writing went from right to left. After the war it changed to left-to-right. (Of course, many [most?] Japanese books still go vertically, with the front of a book at the back--from an English perspective.) The Japanese don't have a real hangup with left-to-right versus right-to-left. I've noticed that on buses and trucks, writing often goes from the front of the vehicle to the back, so that on the left of the vehicle it is L-to-R, and on the right of the vehicle it is R-to-L. On my most recent trip to Japan, I noticed that signs for bathrooms were invariably written "Toilet" (Romanized), rather than in katakana (and rather than using O-te-arai [in kanji and hiragana], like they did 34 years ago when I first went to Japan. I doubt that if Japanese will ever completely abandon kanji, hiragana, and katakana, but the language definitely uses more romanized words today than it did 34 years ago ... Weldon Whipple [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
