Kaixo! On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 02:11:39PM -0700, Weldon Whipple wrote:
> Prior to World War II, Japanese horizontal writing went from right to > left. After the war it changed to left-to-right. Yes, however at that time horizontal text was very marginal, so the change wasn't that hard after all; it is like changing the direction of latin script vertical text (yes, that exists too, in shops devantures and the like, not very used thought; the same as horizontal japanese at that time). > 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. Yes. Note that when going RTL it is always one line only, and it is considered in fact as vertical writting, where each vertical line is only one char long. > 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 ... Having "toilet" written in latin letters in the doors of the toilets of some palces doesn't mean that "the language uses more romanized words". I haven't seen any real japanese phrase with a romanized word in it. Even people's name are written in kana (which sometimes makes it hard to guess who they are writting about) Roman letter acronyms are used however. -- Ki ça vos våye bén, Pablo Saratxaga http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975 _______________________________________________ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
