Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts
Many East Asian scripts can be written horizontally or vertically. Chinese characters, Korean hangul, and Japanese kana may be oriented along either axis, as they consist mainly of disconnected logographic or syllabic units, each occupying a square block of space, thus allowing for flexibility for which direction texts can be written, be it horizontally from left to right, horizontally from right to left, vertically from top to bottom, or even vertically from bottom to top.
Traditionally, written Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese are written vertically in columns going from top to bottom and ordered from right to left, with each new column starting to the left of the preceding one. The stroke order and stroke direction of Chinese characters, Vietnamese chữ Nôm, Korean hangul, and kana all facilitate writing in this manner. In addition, writing in vertical columns from right to left facilitated writing with a brush in the right hand while continually unrolling the sheet of paper or scroll with the left. Since the nineteenth century, it has become increasingly common for these languages to be written horizontally, from left to right, with successive rows going from top to bottom, under the influence of European languages such as English, although vertical writing is still frequently used in Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Macau, and Taiwan.
Differences between horizontal and vertical writing
Chinese characters, Japanese kana, Vietnamese chữ Nôm and Korean hangul can be written horizontally or vertically. There are some small differences in orthography. In horizontal writing it is more common to use Arabic numerals, whereas Chinese numerals are more common in vertical text.In these scripts, the positions of punctuation marks, for example the relative position of commas and full stops, differ between horizontal and vertical writing. Punctuation such as the parentheses, quotation marks, book title marks, ellipsis mark, dash, wavy dash, proper noun mark, wavy book title mark, emphasis mark, and chōon mark are all rotated 90 degrees when switching between horizontal and vertical text.
Where a text is written in horizontal format, pages are read in the same order as English books, with the binding at the left and pages progressing to the right. Vertical books are printed the other way round, with the binding at the right, and pages progressing to the left.
Ruby characters like furigana in Japanese which provides a phonetic guide for unusual or difficult-to-read characters, follow the direction of the main text. Example in Japanese, with furigana in green:
Bopomofo in Taiwan is usually written vertically regardless of the direction of the main text. Text in the Latin alphabet is usually written horizontally when it appears in vertical text, or else it is turned sideways with the base of the characters on the left.
Right-to-left horizontal writing
Historically, vertical writing was the standard system, and horizontal writing was only used where a sign had to fit in a constrained space, such as over the gate of a temple or the signboard of a shop. Before the end of World War II in Japan, those signs were read right to left.Today, the left-to-right direction is dominant in all three languages for horizontal writing: this is due partly to the influence of English and other Western languages to make it easier to read when the two languages are found together—for example, on airport signs at a train station—and partly to the increased use of computerized typesetting and word processing software, most of which does not directly support right-to-left layout of East Asian languages. However, right-to-left horizontal writing is still seen in these scripts, in such places as signs, on the right-hand side of vehicles, and on the right-hand side of stands selling food at festivals. It is also used to simulate archaic writing, for example in reconstructions of old Japan for tourists, and it is still found in the captions and titles of some newspapers.
Left-to-right vertical writing
There are only two types of vertical scripts known to have been written from left to right: the Old Uyghur script and its descendants — Traditional Mongolian, Oirat Clear, Manchu, and Buryat — and the 'Phags-pa script. The former developed because the Uyghurs rotated their Sogdian-derived script, originally written right to left, 90 degrees counter-clockwise to emulate Chinese writing, but without changing the relative orientation of the letters. 'Phags-pa in turn was an adaptation of Tibetan script written vertically on the model of Mongolian to supplant those writing systems current in the Mongol Empire. Of these, only traditional Mongolian still remains in use today in Inner Mongolia.History
Chinese
An early printed Chinese text in horizontal alignment was Robert Morrison's A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, published in 1815–1823 in Macau.The earliest widely known Chinese publication using horizontal alignment was the magazine Science. Its first issue in January 1915 explained the unusual format:
In the subsequent decades, the occurrence of words in a Western script became more frequent, and readers began to appreciate the unwieldiness of rotating the paper at each occurrence for vertically set texts. This accelerated acceptance of horizontal writing.
With the proliferation of horizontal text, both horizontal and vertical came to be used concurrently. Proponents of horizontal text argued that vertical text in right-to-left columns was smudged easily when written, and moreover demanded greater movement from the eyes when read. Vertical text proponents considered horizontal text to be a break from established tradition.
After their victory in the Chinese Civil War, the People's Republic of China decided to use horizontal writing. All newspapers in China changed from vertical to horizontal alignment on 1 January 1956. In publications, text is run horizontally although book titles on spines and some newspaper headlines remain vertical for convenience. Inscriptions of signs on most state organs are still vertical.
In Singapore, vertical writing has also become rare. In Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among older overseas Chinese communities, horizontal writing has been gradually adopted since the 1990s. By the early 2000s, most newspapers in these areas had switched to left-to-right horizontal writing, either entirely or in a combination of vertical text with horizontal left-to-right headings.
Japanese
Horizontal text came into Japanese in the Meiji era, when the Japanese began to print Western language dictionaries. Initially they printed the dictionaries in a mixture of horizontal Western and vertical Japanese text, which meant readers had to rotate the book ninety degrees to read the Western text. Because this was unwieldy, the idea of yokogaki came to be accepted. One of the first publications to partially use yokogaki was a German to Japanese dictionary published in 1885.At the beginning of the change to horizontal alignment in Meiji era Japan, there was a short-lived form called migi yokogaki, in contrast to hidari yokogaki,, the current standard. This resembled the right-to-left horizontal writing style of languages such as Arabic with line breaks on the left. It was probably based on the traditional single-row right-to-left writing. This form was widely used for pre-WWII advertisements and official documents, but has not survived outside of old-fashioned signboards.
Vertical writing is still commonly used in Japan in novels, newspapers and magazines, including most Japanese comics and graphic novels, while horizontal writing is used more often in other media, especially those containing English language references. In general, dialogue in manga is written vertically. However, in scenes where a character speaks a foreign language, the dialogue may be written horizontally. In this case, there is a mixture of vertical and horizontal writing on a single page.
Korean
Traditionally, Korean writing has been vertical, with columns running right to left.In 1988, The Hankyoreh became the first Korean newspaper to use horizontal writing. The Chosun Ilbo was the last major newspaper to publish in vertical right-to-left writing; it published its last issue in vertical right-to-left writing on 1 March 1999, four days before its 79th anniversary. Other major newspapers had already switched to horizontal writing by 1 January 1998; Dong-A Ilbo published its last vertical issue on 31 December 1997, Kyunghyang Shinmun on 6 April 1997, and Maeil Kyungje on 14 September 1996. Announcements about the impending change in these newspapers in the days preceding often shared a common theme of "appealing to younger audiences". Today, major Korean newspapers hardly ever run text vertically.
Vietnamese
Traditionally, Vietnamese writing was vertical, with columns running right to left as the language used a mixture of Chinese characters and independently developed characters derived from Chinese ones to write the native language in a script called chữ Nôm.After the 1920s, when the Vietnamese alphabet, influenced by the Portuguese alphabet, started to be used nationwide to replace chữ Nôm, vertical writing style fell into disuse.
In art
Calligraphy
In East Asian calligraphy, vertical writing remains the dominant direction.Graphic novels and comics
Japanese manga tend to use vertical direction for text. Manga frames tend to flow in right-to-left horizontal direction. Frames in yonkoma manga tend to flow in a vertical direction. Page ordering is the same as books that use vertical direction: from right to left. Frames that are chronologically before or after each other use less spacing in between as a visual cue.Most text in manga is written vertically, which dictates the vertical shapes of the speech bubbles. Some, however, such as Levius, are aimed at the international market and strive to optimize for translation and localization, therefore make use of horizontal text and speech bubbles.
In some cases, horizontal writing in text bubbles may be used to indicate that a translation convention is in use – for example, Kenshi Hirokane uses Japanese text arranged horizontally to imply that a character is actually speaking in a foreign language, like English.
Some publishers that translate manga into European languages may choose to keep the original page order, while other publishers may reverse the page flow with use of mirrored pages. When manga was first released in Anglophone countries, it was usually in the reversed format, but the non-reversed format eventually came to predominate.