Why is Arabic written from right to left?
Why do Arabs write from right to left and we, speakers of Indo-European languages, the other way around?
Arabic writing is partly the result of Egyptian history.
Nothing is a casuality.
The meaning of Arabic writing is understood by the history of ancient civilizations.
Born in Mesopotamia during Antiquity in the fourth millennium BC, the first writing system was invented in the form of cuneiform characters (in the Middle East) and hieroglyphics (in ancient Egypt), around -3500.
Throughout the ages, vast empires consolidate their borders and standardize their oral: Why is Arabic written from right to left?
communication system through the creation of a proto-Sinaitic alphabet around 1400 BC. JC, whose first traces were discovered on a dagger in Lakish, in present-day Israel.
This alphabet, a replica of Egyptian hieroglyphs, contained 23 signs that were already read from right to left.
In the 10th century, the Phoenician Empire – a vast empire of Lebanese origin that dominated the Mediterranean basin for almost 1000 years before Christ – spread the Canaanite throughout the Mediterranean.
They translated the phonemes and consonants of their speaking system into 22-letter alphabetic writing, in a right-to-left writing sense.
This writing system with triple consonant roots will give rise to all the other known alphabets of the Semitic languages: Akkadian, Assyrian, Aramaic, Arabic and Hebrew, later Greek and Latin are formed.
We are not going to trace the entire history of writing, but we will remember that Phoenician gives rise to the Aramaic alphabet, the mother tongue of Jesus Christ, which derives from the Arabic alphabet in the second century of our era.
We know that Arabic is written from right to left due to the linguistic heritage of the Aramaeans.
What is not so clear is WHY the peoples of the Arabian peninsula began to write from the right.
We only have a series of hypotheses about the meaning of Arabic writing:
The type of material used in ancient times (reed, stone, calamus, etc.),
The guiding hand to carve the stone (there have always been more right-handed than left-handed),
The sense in which documents are unrolled in ancient Egypt: Egyptian scribes unrolled papyri with the left hand to read and write to the left,
A sense of writing that mimics that of ancient times , because each civilization uses the knowledge of its elders.
A question to know more: why do we write from left to right?
