Which is the only language which is written from left to right and is read from right to left and why?

Answer 1

mmm...
I have no idea, but I'll give a wild guess.
It is not a language, but a writing system. I think the answer could be the Braile system. The different directions might be explained because it is writen on the BACK of the page.
But.. as far as I know, thie reasoning would mean it is written from right to left and read from left to right... which is not what you said.
To continue my super wild guess... (and to try to make this guess even more wild!), I'd think a language as Hebrew or Arabic (written in Braile, that is) would fullfill your criteria.
But I honestly have no idea.

Answer 2

There is no such language, as far as I know.

As Waffles says, composition of a single Chinese character happens from left to right. But the actual order in which the characters is written is the same order in which the characters are read. It wouldn't make much sense otherwise.

Answer 3

WRITTEN left-to-right and READ right-to-left? Chinese technically qualifies. It's traditionally read in top-to-down columns, from right to left, and the proper writing technique begins each character from the left, finishing to the right.

For example, the character 暗 is began by drawing the 日 on the left, with left-to-right strokes. Next, 立 is drawn on the right, again with left-to-right strokes, followed by another 日 underneath it.

Answer 4

taiwanese is similar. they read the books back to the front aswell cos all their sentances are read right to left. i suppose in a way they are getting to the point without having to read all the drivvel in between. also i read my magazines back to front so that bit isnt odd :D

Answer 5

I think arabic language is the right answer for this question.

Answer 6

Chinese

Answer 7

Written Chinese refers to the written symbols used to represent spoken Chinese, along with rules and conventions about how they are arranged and punctuated. These symbols are commonly known as Chinese characters (traditional/simplified Chinese: 漢字/汉字; pīnyīn: hànzì), many of which have been definitively traced back to the 商 Shāng Dynasty about 1500 BCE, though the process of creating characters likely began some centuries earlier.[1] Over the millennia, the forms of these characters have evolved into well-developed traditions for Chinese calligraphy.[2]

Chinese characters were standardized under the 秦 Qín dynasty (221–206 BCE)[3], reflecting the spoken languages and dialects of Chang An, the capital (modern Xi'An). Throughout historical changes in pronunciation, the characters have remained comparatively constant, and have thus served as a way for Chinese speakers in disparate dialect groups to communicate in writing.[4] Educated Chinese know roughly 4,000 characters.[5][6] Some Chinese characters have also been adopted as part of the writing system in some other East Asian languages, such as Japanese and Korean.[7][8]

Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Instead, they are built up from simpler parts representing objects or abstract notions,[9] although most characters do contain some indication of their pronunciation.[10] Nonetheless, the great number of Chinese characters has given rise to the adoption of Western alphabets as an alternative for representing Chinese.[11]

Written Chinese developed as a way of representing spoken Chinese, rather than the other way around. In the early stages of written Chinese, spoken Chinese was a monosyllabic language. That is, Chinese words representing independent concepts (objects, actions, relations, and so forth) were generally each one syllable in spoken Chinese.[12]

Since then, the Chinese language has diversified into many dialects; furthermore, these dialects have become more or less polysyllabic, so that many—often most—independent concepts are expressed with more than one syllable; the old syllables, in many cases, no longer stand on their own, in the same way that pre- "earlier" cannot typically be used on its own as an English word.[13] However, since the meanings of the modern Chinese words can be analyzed in terms of the old Chinese syllables that constitute them, written Chinese has been continuously used to represent individual Chinese syllables.[14] Each of these syllables represents a morpheme, or semantic unit, so written Chinese is generally (though not universally) considered to be logographic; at least one scholar considers it essentially a large, inefficient phonetic script.[15]

Chinese dialects vary not only by pronunciation, but to a lesser degree also vocabulary and syntax. For this reason, many scholars eschew the word "dialect" in favor of more neutral terms such as "regionalect".[16] Since these terms are usually familiar only to specialists, this article will use the somewhat contentious but more familiar term "dialect".

Because dialects differ in their vocabulary and syntax, a single written Chinese standard cannot represent all dialects equally well. Modern written Chinese, which became the written standard as an indirect result of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, is not technically bound to any single dialect; however, it most nearly represents the vocabulary and syntax of Mandarin, by far the most widespread Chinese dialect in terms of both geographical area and number of speakers.[17] Nonetheless, this version of written Chinese is usually given the non-denominational name of Vernacular Chinese, or 白話/白话 báihuà (literally, "clear tongue").[18]

Prior to the development of Vernacular Chinese, the prevailing written standard denoted a vocabulary and syntax rooted in Chinese as spoken around the time of Confucius (about 500 BCE), called Classical Chinese, or 文言 wényán. Over the centuries, Classical Chinese gradually acquired features from various dialects. However, this accretion was generally slow and minor, so that just before it was supplanted by Vernacular Chinese, Classical Chinese was distinctly different from any contemporary dialect.[19]

Classical Chinese retained much of the vocabulary and syntax of the two-millennia-old version of spoken Chinese it was derived from, so it had to be taught separately from ones native dialect.[20] Once learned, however, it served as a viable common medium for communication between people speaking different dialects—dialects that often came to be mutually unintelligible by the end of the first millennium CE.[21] A Mandarin speaker might say yÄ«, a Cantonese yat, and a Hokkienese tsit, but all three will understand the character 一 "one".[4] Despite its ties to the dominant Mandarin dialect, Vernacular Chinese serves the same function to a degree, limited by the fact that Vernacular Chinese expressions are often ungrammatical or unidiomatic in many of the non-Mandarin dialects. This role may not differ substantially from the role of other lingua francas such as Latin: For those trained in written Chinese, it serves as a common medium; for those untrained in it, the graphic nature of the characters is in general no aid to common understanding (characters such as "one" notwithstanding).[22]

The variation in vocabulary among dialects has also led to the informal use of "dialectal characters", as well as standard characters that are nevertheless considered archaic by today's standards.[23] Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a written colloquial standard, used in Hong Kong and overseas, with a large number of unofficial characters for words particular to this dialect.[24] Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging, although for formal written communications Cantonese speakers still normally use standard written Chinese.[25]

Chinese characters were first introduced into Japanese sometime in the first half of the first millennium CE, probably from Chinese products imported into Japan.[7] At the time, Japanese had no native written system, and the characters were used for the most part to represent Japanese words with the corresponding meanings, rather than similar pronunciations. A notable exception to this rule was the system of manyogana, which used a small set of Chinese characters to help indicate pronunciation. The manyogana later developed into the phonetic alphabets, hiragana and katakana.[26]

The Chinese characters imported into Japanese were called hànzì, after the æ¼¢/汉 Hàn Dynasty of China; in Japanese, this was pronounced kanji. In modern written Japanese, kanji are used for nouns, verb stems, and adjective stems, while the hiragana are used for prefixes and suffixes. The katakana are used exclusively for sound symbols, and for loans from other languages. The Jōyō Kanji, a list of kanji for common use standardized by the Japanese government, contains 1,945 characters—about half the number of characters commanded by literate Chinese.[8]

The role of Chinese characters in Korean and Vietnamese, by contrast, is much more limited today. At one time, many Chinese characters (called hanja, a term cognate to both hànzì and kanji) were introduced into Korean for their meaning, just as in Japanese.[8] However, today, written Korean relies almost exclusively on the phonetic Hangul script, in which each syllable is written with two or three phonetic symbols that combine to form a single character. Similarly, the use of Chinese and Chinese-styled characters in the Vietnamese chữ nôm script has been almost entirely superseded by the quốc ngữ alphabet.[27]
Written Chinese is unusual in being the only major modern-day writing system not based predominantly on an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Instead, Chinese characters are glyphs whose parts may depict objects or represent abstract notions. These parts may occasionally stand alone as independent characters; far more typically, they are combined, using a variety of different principles, to form more complex characters. The most popularly known exposition of Chinese character composition is the 說文解字/说文解字 Shuōwén Jiězì, compiled by 許慎/许慎 Xǚ Shèn around 120 CE. Since Xǚ Shèn did not have access to Chinese characters in their earliest forms, his analysis, based as it is on somewhat later forms, cannot be taken as authoritative.[28] Nonetheless, no later work has supplanted the Shuōwén Jiězì in terms of breadth, so it remains the most accessible source for non-specialists, via its various redactions.[9]

According to the Shuōwén Jiězì, Chinese characters are developed on six basic principles.[29] (These principles, though popularized by the Shuōwén Jiězì, must have been developed earlier; the oldest known mention of them is in the 周禮/周礼 Zhōulǐ—literally, "Rites of Zhou"—a text from about 150 BCE.) The first two principles produce simple characters, known as 文 wén:

象形 xiàngxíng: Pictographs, in which the character is a graphical depiction of the object it denotes. Examples: 人 rén "person", 日 rì "sun", 木 mù "tree/wood".
指事 zhǐshì: Indicatives, or ideographs, in which the character represents an abstract notion. Examples: 上 shàng "up", 下 xià "down", 三 sān "three".
The remaining four principles produce complex characters historically called 字 zì (although this term is now generally used to refer to all characters, whether simple or complex). Of these four, two construct characters from simpler parts:

會意/会意 huìyì: Logical aggregates, in which two or more parts are used for their meaning. This yields a composite meaning, which is then applied to the new character. Example: 東/东 dōng "east", which represents a sun rising in the trees.
形聲/形声 xíngshēng: Phonetic complexes, in which one part indicates the general semantic category of the character (such as water-related or eye-related), and the other part is another character, used exclusively (in most cases) for its phonetic value. Example: 晴 qíng "clear/fair (weather)", which is composed of 日 rì "sun", and 青 qīng "blue/green", which is used solely for its pronunciation.
In contrast to the popular conception of Chinese as a primarily pictographic or ideographic language, by far the vast majority of Chinese characters (about 95 percent of the characters in the Shuōwén Jiězì) are constructed as either logical aggregates or, more often, phonetic complexes.[10] In fact, some modern phonetic complexes were originally simple pictographs that were later augmented by the addition of a semantic root. An example of this is 炷 zhù "candle", which was originally a pictograph 主, a character that is now pronounced zhǔ and means "host". The character 火 huǒ "fire" was added to indicate that the meaning is fire-related.[30]

The last two principles do not produce new written forms; instead, they transfer new meanings to existing forms:

轉注/转注 zhuǎnzhù: Transference, in which a character, often with a simple, concrete meaning takes on an extended, more abstract meaning. Example: 網/网 wǎng "net", which was originally a pictograph depicting a fishing net. Over time, it has taken on an extended meaning, covering any kind of lattice. Today, in fact, it can be used to refer to a computer network; the word 網上/网上 wǎngshàng means "on the Internet".
假借 jiǎjiè: False borrowing, in which a character is used, either intentionally or accidentally, for some entirely different purpose. Example: 哥 gē "older brother", which is written with a character originally meaning "song/sing", now written 歌 gē. At one point, there was no character for "older brother", so an otherwise unrelated character with the right pronunciation was borrowed for the purpose.
Chinese characters are generally written to fit into a square (except for simple characters such as 一 yī "one" for which this is not possible), even when they are composed of two simpler forms written side by side or top to bottom. In such cases, each form is compressed appropriately so that the entire character continues to fit into a square.

Although most Chinese characters have a canonical form, there is nonetheless considerable variation in how they are written or printed on a page, a variation that goes beyond the familiar notion of typeface or font for alphabetic languages. Today, there are five recognized written traditions for Chinese writing style.[2] These five categories are not sharply delineated, so that one may write Chinese that is, for example, halfway between two styles:

篆書/篆书 zhuànshū: Seal script, which represents the oldest forms of Chinese characters surviving to modern use. They are used principally for signature seals, or chops, which are often used in place of a signature, for Chinese documents and artwork.
隸書/隶书 lìshÅ«: Clerical script, which was developed during the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–8 CE). Like seal script, clerical script is in limited use (often in restaurant menus) and has a distinctively antiquated appearance.
行書/行书 xíngshū: Running script, a semi-cursive form, in which the character parts begin to run into each other, although the characters themselves generally remain separate. There are many conventions in which some characters deviate from their canonical forms in a consistent manner.
草書/草书 cǎoshū: Grass script, a fully cursive form, in which the characters are often entirely unrecognizable by their canonical forms. Grass script gives the impression of anarchy in its appearance, and there is indeed considerable freedom on the part of the calligrapher, but this freedom is circumscribed by conventional "abbreviations" in the forms of the characters.
楷書/楷书 kǎishū: Regular script, a non-cursive form, in which each stroke of each character is clearly drawn out from the others. Even though both the running and grass scripts appear to be derived as semi-cursive and cursive variants of regular script, it is in fact the regular script that was the last to develop.


Seal Clerical Running (semi-cursive) Grass (fully cursive) Regular (non-cursive)

Regular script, as its name suggests, is considered the archetype for Chinese writing, and forms the basis for most printed forms. In addition, regular script imposes a stroke order, which must be followed in order for the characters to be written correctly.[31] (Strictly speaking, this stroke order applies to the clerical, running, and grass scripts as well, but especially in the running and grass scripts, this order is occasionally deviated from.) Thus, for instance, the character 木 mù "wood" cannot be written in just any fashion. Instead, the horizontal stroke must be written first, from left to right; next, the vertical stroke, from top to bottom, with a small hook toward the upper left at the end; next, the left diagonal stroke, from top to bottom; and lastly the right diagonal stroke, from top to bottom.

Chinese characters conform to a roughly square frame and are not usually linked to one another, so they can conceivably be written in any direction in a square grid. Traditionally, Chinese is written in vertical columns from top to bottom; the first column is on the right side of the page, and the text runs toward the left. Text written in Classical Chinese also uses little or no punctuation.[37] In such cases, sentence and phrase breaks are determined by context, rhythm, and in the instance of famous passages, memory as well.

In modern times, the familiar Western layout of horizontal rows from left to right, read from the top of the page to the bottom, has become more popular, especially in the People's Republic of China, with the rise of Vernacular Chinese. Punctuation has also become more prevalent, whether the text is written in columns or rows. The punctuation marks are clearly influenced by their Western counterparts, although some marks are particular to Chinese: in particular, the quotation marks, the hollow period (which is otherwise used just like an ordinary full stop), and a special kind of comma that is used to separate items in a list, as opposed to clauses in a sentence.

Signs are often a particularly challenging aspect of written Chinese layout, since they can be written either left to right or right to left (the latter can be thought of as the traditional layout with "columns" of height one), as well as from top to bottom. It is not unusual to encounter all three orientations on signs on neighboring stores. However, in 2004, Taiwan mandated a Western, left-to-right layout of Chinese for most texts (excluding arts and literature).[38]