4d ago

At least we're not mixing in letters

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Also why clockwise?
Earth rotates and orbits counter clockwise. It just seems more right
- To be fair whichever direction they made it go would be clockwise
  
  True, but also it’s because of sundials
- Because Sundials rotate clockwise ( in north hemisphere )
- Earth rotates and orbits counter clockwise.
  No it doesn't. It depends on the human perception of "up" and "down" which are completely arbitrary. We by convention see the North Pole as the "top" of the world but it could as easily be seen as Antarctica.
- Well that depends on where you look at the earth from doesn’t it. It’s like saying ‘righty righty, lefty loosey’ which only holds true as long as you’re thinking about the top edge of the screw head.
- Well, depending on which hemisphere you're standing in, at least. We arbitrarily set this idea that north = up in most depictions of the globe, but we could just as easily make Antarctica the top of the world and everything rotates the other way.
  The reason why clockwise is what it is, is because sundials were first used to tell time in the northern hemisphere, where the shadows move clockwise. If it was in the southern hemisphere, they'd have moved counterclockwise (which would be clockwise).
  
  Before the age of exploration, orientation of maps were random. North became the norm so Europe could be placed at the top center.
- Also why clockwise?
  We read from left-to-right, so the front span of numbers continues that visual pattern.
  
  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
  
  The answer is ‘sundials’
  
  We?
  
  Yes. This post is in English.

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