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Comment by jerry40 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, the Oscan language had the letter "Я". I thought it exists in cyrillic alphabets only. I know they are different letters having (perhaps) different pronunciation but still. Interesting!

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It's very common for writing systems of that time to mirror the letters when switching write direction. In some cases text used to be written as boustrophedon, i.e. switching direction each line (like an ox plowing a field).

Early Greek thus had not a fixed direction and derivative alphabets such as the Etruscan have settled to one direction of text flow and of letter shapes at random, namely right to left.

Latin has "forked" from the Greek alphabet at another point in time and thus has reversed direction of writing and reverse glyphs with respect to Etruscan and Oscan

Thanks for the explanation! Mirroring the letters is very unusial concept for me. I've tried to write down a mirrored word and it was not very difficult actually. It is definitely readable.

Yeah, people talk about Da Vinci writing backwards as a "code" but it's an easy trick if you want to write left-handed without smearing your ink (which was even worse with older inks with longer drying times). Our brains do really well with mirroring operations, especially if you switch hands when mirroring.

I've noticed this too, I think it has something to do with the fact that the two hands are "mirrored" in a sense, and operations like opening/closing arms are identical except for mirroring. Who knows, maybe they're even encoded like this somewhere in the brain.

After getting used to it it's not that hard to write mirrored text with the opposite hand. It's definitely a lot easier than doing it with the dominant one.

Early Latin could also written right to left, e.g. in the Duenos inscription.

Interestingly, neither the order of letters in the alphabet nor the direction of writing (or even the orientation of letters themselves) was standardized until later times; in Greek, on the other hand, letters were used as numbers in such a way that the letter ordering was important.

In fact, the LTR systems are the original mirroring; Greek script was a mirroring of the RTL Phoenician/Canaanite abjad.

The illustrated inscription was written from right to left, so it was a backwards letter. According to the caption, it was the letter D. It would usually have been written just as it is in Latin and English, and I'm not sure why it has a tail here. P and R in Oscan were written as they are in Greek (Π, Ρ) except mirrored.

Cyrillic Я is a variant of Old Cyrillic Yys (Ѧ).

I've never heard Ѧ called Yys, normally Yus - is that a typo or just terminology from a non-Russian Slavonic language? (genuine question, not trying to be a pedant)

Typo.

Most italic scripts and etruscan were written RTL

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