So you have a Cipher Language or your characters write in Wingdinglish. But it needs to be made just a leeeettle bit more exotic. How would you do that?
Just mention someone writing it right to left, or top to bottom, or in other directions, and that instantly cements the language's foreignness! This writing order generally also carries over to illustrations or Feelies. The direction of writing is occasionally (now rarely) characterized to be a holdover from writing in ink or clay, the direction preventing a trailing sleeve from smudging the writing.
One particularly popular style of writing seems to be boustrophedonic writing (from the Classical Greek for "as the ox ploughs") in which the first line is written from left to right, the second line from right to left, the third line from left to right, the fourth line from right to left, and so on.
Examples:
Films — Animation
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire: The Atlantean language uses a boustrophedonic Wingdinglish script and is described as the "mother language" from which all others descended.
Literature
- Artemis Fowl: The Fairies write in spirals. Later Defied by having the green text horizontal and explaining that the spirals gave the fairies migraines — the example shown is a very old piece of writing.
- A Canticle for Leibowitz:: Inverted. The Wandering Jew (well, a wandering Jew) refers to Gentiles writing backwards when he reads what Brother Francis writes on a rock — since Hebrew is written right to left, Western script looks foreign and backwards to him.
- Discworld:
- Moving Pictures: A plot point is a book written in pictograms depicting a "man behind the door", which is translated as "a prisoner". When the Librarian starts reading it and follows his read with his finger, the protagonist notices him reading backwards and understands the man is in front of the door, "a guardian".
- Mort: The book Death uses to work out who's due to die is read spiralling out from the centre of the page.
- Gor: Writing on the planet Gor is done left-to-right for the first line, then right-to-left for the second, etc.
- In the Grave Robbers' Chronicles book Angry Seas, Hidden Sands by Xu Lei, Wu Xie reads a message in Chinese characters he finds in the Xisha Underwater Tomb left-to-right and interprets it as a message from Xie Lianhuan accusing Wu Sanxing of trying to kill him. Much later, in Graveyard for a Queen, he learns that he was supposed to read the message right-to-left as an accusation by Wu Sanxing against Xie Lianhuan.
- Gulliver's Travels: The Lilliputians write "neither from the left to the right, like the Europeans; nor from right to the left, like the Arabians; nor from up to down, like the Chinese; nor from down to up, like the Cascagians; but aslant from one corner to the other, like ladies in England."
- Professor Branestawm: The Professor is puzzled by a letter in mirror writing. While trying to decide what language it is, one that he mentions it definitely isn't is written around the edges of the paper.
Live-Action TV
- Fringe: The Observer writes right to left in unintelligible symbols. The Child in the first season, who probably had some connection to the Observer, wrote in English upside down and backwards.
- Star Trek: The Vulcan language
◊ is written vertically (with occasional links from one column to another) and Ferengi◊ branches from a central point at 60-degree angles.
- Doctor Who has Circular Gallifreyan, a language written counterclockwise around the circumference of circles, where individual words or even individual sentences are written in recursively smaller bubbles around the circumference of a larger circle that represents the whole text.
Tabletop Games
- Magic: The Gathering: The language of the sinister Phyrexian invaders is written upon a continuous line that can go in any direction. A long vertical stroke marks the beginning of each sentence.
- Forgotten Realms: Dwarves' runic script is often inscribed to circle around a central drawing, symbol, or emblem.
Theatre
- My Fair Lady: "And the Hebrews learn it backwards, which is absolutely frightening."
Video Games
- The Elder Scrolls: The language of the demonic Daedra is simply a substitution cipher for English, give or take a few letters. However, it has notably been written in various ways throughout the series, including in reverse, from top to bottom, upside down, with the first letter much larger (and in a different color), and even with the characters superimposed on top of one another.
- Outer Wilds: The Nomai, the extinct Precursors whose civilization you're researching, wrote in spirals, from the center out. When having conversations in text form, replies would start at some point on the original spiral and spiral out further from there.
Webcomics
- Homestuck: The script used on Alternia is typed right-to-left.
Real Life
- The Phoenician alphabet, the ancestor of the majority of Old World scripts, is written right-to-left. Some of its child systems switched to left-to-right (most notably Greek, which in turn gave birth to Latin and Cyrillic, and Brahmi). Others retained the right-to-left orientation, even as their forms changed. The most famous examples of these are Arabic (whose usage as official script in some 26 countries also makes it the most widespread) and Hebrew.
- Japanese is traditionally written from top to bottom, with the columns starting from the right. This is why manga is published "backwards", and why many Western manga-style comics (MegaTokyo and Scott Pilgrim for example) will have a message printed on the last page reminding you to read the book starting from the other end because it's NOT from Japan. Zig-zagged in that nowadays it's usually written left-to-right outside of manga, which came about as books in both Japanese and Western languages meant people had to keep rotating the books to read text.
- Japanese plays around with this. Depending on the publication, its orientation can be either "Western" (left-to-right) or "Traditional" (right-to-left). Manga and writing in general is a holdout for "traditional" orientation, but plenty of modern magazines publish text in left-to-right rows rather than right-to-left columns. One just has to understand both methods to know at a glance which of the two is being used.
- Chinese can be written vertically or horizontally, or right-to-left left-to-right, respectively. The most common direction is top-to-bottom, right-to-left, as the writing surface (bamboo) meant writing vertically was easier. Nowadays, due to the split between "Traditional" Chinese (used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau) and "Simplified" Chinese (used in Mainland China and Singapore), there's a notable split – the latter is exclusively printed in rows left-to-right while the former is still usually printed in columns right-to-left. One upside of the Modern reckoning is that it's easier to print mathematical formulas alongside.note
- Korean was originally written using Chinese characters and likewise read vertically right-to-left. When the Korean alphabet, called "hangeul", was introduced in the 1500's, it also was written vertically. However, since World War 2, Koreans on both sides of the DMZ write horizontally left-to-right. Also, Korean clusters its letters in syllables that, depending on the vowel used, must be read vertically, horizontally, or a combination of both (if you are confused, look at how these syllables are constructed: da=다, dal=달, dalk=닭, do=도, dol=돌, dolm=돎).
- Traditional poetry, especially in North Korea, is still printed vertically using the right-to-left format.
- The traditional Mongolian script is unusual in that it, like its close relatives (e.g. Manchu) is traditionally written in columns running left-to-right, the exact opposite of Traditional Chinese. However, it is the only vertical script that works this way, which probably contributes to its declining usage in modern times, since writing top to bottom in digital media all the time is very clunky. It also has a non-indigenous origin; the script is ultimately descended from Aramaic by way of the Sogdian alphabet.
- Bataknese script (Aksara Batak) from North Sumatra, Indonesia, is written left-to-right just like most other Austronesian languages in the region, but because the only writing medium is rock, bones, or bamboo AND they haven't invented the work table. It's rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise and written from bottom to top while the author holds the bamboo/bones in their laps with the left hand, and the carving tools in their right. The rarity of good writing medium in the first place and the mentioned difficulty (not to mention the risk of injury) of the writing process make it that most people can't practice writing anyway (literacy level is decent enough, but most written text comes in form of public rules and the such) and contribute to the strong oral tradition (and Large Ham tendencies) that still present in Bataknese culture today.
- Occasionally, geneticists write the code for DNA boustrophedonically if that's the coding sequence or if they are producing antisense RNA.
- Ancient Greek could be written boustrophedon style, which, given that it's also all block capitals and written without punctuation, can be confusing to read.
- Rongorongo from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) was apparently written with alternating lines rotated by 180º relative to one another - upside down as well as backwards. Because of that, even though Rapa-Nui as a language still exists, not even its own speakers have any clue what the native script really says or means.
