Office of the President of Mongolia: Top to bottom text on the web | Hacker News Reader

Office of the President of Mongolia: Top to bottom text on the web

president.mn

348 pointsrobin_reala208 comments

Cool. There is actually a W3C draft spec for Mongolian script![1]

We tend to assume that left-to-right script is a law of nature but it is just one of many variations that have been invented and used across space and time. Right-to-left (Arab / Hebrew) [2] is well known but a most intriguing one used in antiquity by Greeks and others is Boustrophedon (alternating from left-to-right / right-to-left).[3]

Boustrophedon mode is in one sense the optimal script form. At the one-time expense of having to learn to recognize letters and words both ways one can then (in principle) speed up reading as the eyeballs don't need to jump across the page to start a new line :-)

[1] https://www.w3.org/International/mlreq/

[2] https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-scripts

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon

Now this is the kind of nano-optimization I can get behind!

Korean can be written left to right or top to bottom, which is very cool.

I'm guessing it was top to bottom and then during the modernization process, left to right was added? It's smart that both forms are allowed though as I could imagine modifying a written language takes many years and massive public effort.

Yep, it used to be top to bottom, and the columns were arranged right to left. As a side effect of this recent transition, it's not particularly difficult to read Korean right to left, either.

It's the same in Chinese and Japanese. It helps a lot that the letters are designed fit into individual square blocks. The blocks can be arranged any way you want. There have been internet memes, for example, written to mean one thing when you read left to right and a completely different thing top to bottom.

Note that Japanese went with horizontal right to left for a while before going with left to right. I don't know if Chinese or Korean did the same.

I think Chinese was usually written right to left when written horizontally. This can still be seen for instance at the front of temples and gates.

I think you mean vertically.

But yes, Chinese was written top down, right to left. The PRC basically switched over to left-right, top-bottom right away (it kind of went hand in hand with the simplification project). Taiwan for example kept the traditional format for a lot longer.

When I was learning Mandarin in the late 90s, all our imported material from Taiwan was still top-down, right to left.

Here's an example Taiwanese newpaper from 1993 (yes, that's Michael Jackson) https://www.taipeitimes.com/images/2021/08/29/p08-210829-fro...

You can see the body text is arranged top-bottom, right to left, and the headlines employ a mixture of approaches.

The traditional way is vertically, indeed, but on occasions you had to write horizontally, which was then usually also done right to left (can still be seen here and there, as I mentioned in my previous comment).

> The traditional way is vertically, indeed, but on occasions you had to write horizontally

There's not really a distinction. Chinese was written in columns from right to left. When the columns were one character long, they were still columns.

To distinguish horizontal writing from vertical writing, you'd need a writing sample that had multiple columns and also multiple rows. (Because, as noted above, there's no way to tell the difference between 1 row of 5 characters vs 5 columns of 1 character each.) As far as I'm aware, traditional Chinese writing is fully accounted for by the theory that it was always written in columns and never in rows.

On the other hand, the Taiwanese newspaper isn't making a great case: the "mixture of approaches" used in the headlines are a couple vertical headlines going top down, and several horizontal headings, including the primary headline "Michael Jackson、arrives!", which all go left-to-right. The body text in the infoboxes in the top left and right corners of the page also goes from left to right, though it appears to be true that the article text is in columns. The name of the newspaper (top center) is also printed left-to-right.

At least for Korean, it was right to left only when written top to bottom. Then it changed to left to right. It's never been right to left horizontally. I think it's the same with Chinese. I'm not sure about Japanese.

I've read that there are Arabic-Chinese dictionaries where Chinese is written from right to left to match Arabic direction of writing, but I don't know how common this is.

Hangul in general is pretty smart in general. You can get the hang of it in an afternoon, which is something you cannot say about the Korean language in general.

In general, you're correct

I generally am.

Do the individual syllables also reverse direction? They're normally read left to right and top to bottom. I'd imagine that they're taken in as complete syllables by readers rather than read sound-by-sound, so they maintain left-to-right.

I'm not an expert on alphabetization, but AFAIK kids actually have some trouble getting the letters "the right way round", I think especially if they start very early. They might be learning the abstract shape first and the learn to force it into the self-relative forms like always-left-to-right. Which kind of makes sense, since objects in nature are usually encountered from all sides, orientation is rarely valuable. So in that sense I'm not convinced it's really an expense to have to learn it. And anecdotally, my son when he was 3-4, when presented with a grid of items would tend to go over it row by row in alternative directions, like writing in boustrophedon. And as you say it would also make very long lines of text more readable - I think Greek inscriptions often have ludicrous line lengths, like several meters. So there it's not just your eyeballs that are jumping, you actually have to walk back to the start of the next line!

I once read that the brain stores the shape of the letter and the orientation separately, so both have to be learned.

kids are excellent at picking information because their brains by default will attempt "wild" interpretations of the same information. Their brains are the perfect startup in a way, in that they fail quick, they fail often , and they learn immediately.

This is also why its hard to do magic tricks with young kids. They will tend to be looking at all the wrong spots. Their brain doesn't pick up on attempted misdirection, it just decide to make a new test happen from a different vantage point.

My favorite is Egyptian which had the extra feature that the letters were equivalent if rotated with respect to the y axis.

So if you had an animal looking letter you could place it in a aesthetically pleasing way looking left or right e.g. on each side of a door

I don't get it. Do you have an example that you can show this happening in?

Thanks!

I think the OP means that E and Ǝ would be equivalent.

This actually works fine with latin letters. Think of for example advertising or graffiti where this trick is used sometimes to gain attention.

Not all of them, depending on font (and case) - bdpq, sz.

It works fine with all of them. It's true that some letters are mirrored forms of other letters, but that doesn't leave any ambiguity - the form of the letter is oriented to the direction of reading, so "b" is a B when you're reading left-to-right and it's a D when you're reading right-to-left.

Here is an illustration and explanation: https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/images/glyph...

The whole page: https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/page4.htm

I wonder if this horizontal glyph direction has some sort of meaning lost to the sands of time. Armchair speculating outloud, maybe it’s not purely aesthetic and could imply some sort of past/future tense?

I don't think it does. Chinese, Japanese and Korean had been using vertical writing for centuries, only switching to horizontal ones around 20th century for interoperability with Western writing (such as math or chemical formulae).

Mongolian script, from the link presented here, has actually switched from being horizontal to being vertical (under influence of Chinese).

My understanding is that hieroglyphics can be read and written in either direction, and that the animal characters in particular give it away, if they're face right you read from the right and vice versa.

Yes, and there are some inscriptions where this is used, for example in "speech bubbles", where two figures facing each other on a wall talk to each other, with the texts flowing in different directions.

It was the attempt to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs into Phoenician which led to all of today's alphabetic languages. Archaeologists recently found a temple in the Jordan area in which the earliest known attempt at an alphabetic language was written; it was a translation between Egyptian and Phoenician.

Alphabetic, non pictographic languages are an order of magnitude easier to learn and express than pictographic languages, which require rote memorization of hundreds to thousands of pictographs and their modifiers. In contrast, the language you're reading this post in allows you to guess the sound of the words by the spelling, which is simply impossible in, say, Mandarin.

I agree with your point in general, that alphabetic systems are easier to pick up. However, it’s not true that you can’t guess the sound of a Chinese character. From Wikipedia [0]:

    Radical–phonetic compounds, in which one component (the radical) indicates the general meaning of the character, and the other (the phonetic) hints at the pronunciation. An example is 樑 (liáng), where the phonetic 梁 liáng indicates the pronunciation of the character and the radical 木 ('wood') indicates its meaning of 'supporting beam'. Characters of this type constitute around 90% of Chinese logograms.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram

Note that the "phonetic" component can become incredibly strained in modern Chinese languages. Eg, take the character "俞"; in Mandarin, it's pronounced "yú". However, it's used as a phonetic component in:

1) 输: pronounced "shū"

2) 偷: pronounced "tōu"

(There are even worse examples which I can't think of in the moment)

Phonetics don't really tell you the tone. Also, there are tons and tons of exceptions.

Similar to English and other less-than-perfect phonetic languages? Or worse?

That brongs up the question? Are there actually alphabet based languages which are worse than English at pronunciation - transcription correspondence? The few I know are all better.

I loved learning to read Japanese through the second volume of Heisig's _Learning the Kanji_. Volume 1, which teaches only meanings, is a slog, but volume 2, which teaches the Sino-Japanese readings is a beautiful example of organizing material to minimize entropy and maximize benefit for memorization as soon as possible. Unfortunately he never put together a volume 2 for a Chinese language. I haven't worked on it in a while, but I have a project where I attempt re-create the book for Japanese as well as Mandarin, Korean, and Vietnamese: https://nateglenn.com/uniunihan-db/ (repo: https://github.com/garfieldnate/uniunihan-db).

The "pure groups" are the ones where the presence of a specific radical guarantee you a specific pronunciation (within the list of character/pronunciation pairs you're trying to learn). Of the 4800 characters I used for the volume, only 290 are in the chapter on pure groups. The rest are either in semi-regular groups with varying numbers of exceptions, or in completely irregular groups with no discernible patterns.

The characters were designed continuously over a period of time starting thousands of years ago, and the phonetic parts were sometimes exact and sometimes just clues, similar sounds or rhymes to give the reader a hint. Ancient Chinese pronunciation has changed beyond recognition, so it makes perfect sense that the pronunciations wouldn't be regular anymore.

Mainland China uses a "simplified" character set, which did not affect literacy but in my opinion is a bit more difficult to read; they reduced the number of lines so that more characters look samey and they combined many (Mandarin) homonyms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters#...), removing the meaning portion of characters that would have distinguished them. The simplification did not apply to all characters, so to achieve a high level of literacy you need to know traditional forms, anyway.

It would be interesting to see someone try to actually remodel hanzi from scratch for a specific dialect of Chinese, using 100% regular phonetic components and no variants; multiple pronunciations of a character in the current system would be required to be written differently. An interesting example of this would be certain Korean gukja, where they've combined a Chinese character with a phonetic hangeul (example: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%AB%87). This would be a truly simplified Chinese character set... but all of the culture's history that gets built into spelling over time would be completely lost, which is why I always prefer conservative spelling systems.

> the language you're reading this post in allows you to guess the sound of the words by the spelling

It is "a guess" at best, and that guess won't be correct most of the time, unless you know the word already. And when you don't, you'll be dealing with all kinds of Cansas/Arcansas and although/drought/through/bought/cough/enough most of the time.

In e.g. Russian or German, you can read the word from the way it is written and maybe miss the accent. In e.g. Spanish you can read the word correctly with the right accent most of the time. Even Korean is more phonetic than English - in English the best you've got is a guess.

Not unlike Mandarin, by the way.

Source: non-native speaker of English, also speaker of some other languages.

It's a necessary evil owing to the large English lexicon filled with homophones. The Japanese stick to their ponderous use of Chinese characters for similar reasons.

> It's a necessary evil owing to the large English lexicon filled with homophones. The Japanese stick to their ponderous use of Chinese characters for similar reasons.

This is a common and incredibly stupid argument. Note that it immediately implies that oral communication in English and Japanese is impossible.

Early video games didn't have the memory available to render text in kanji and used kana exclusively. This caused zero problems.

Why do they use kanji now?

Because that's what Japanese writing is like. Why do US senators wear suits instead of T-shirts?

There's something to that argument in Japanese. According to [1] Japanese has 643 distinct syllables, while English has about 6949.

There's a lot more context in speech and video games and long-form writing than in random writing and signs. It's virtually impossible to convey a meaning to a product or company name without using kanji.

For example, let's take a company named "Bandai". Now look up "ban" (https://jisho.org/search/ban) and look up "dai" (https://jisho.org/search/dai) and "da" (https://jisho.org/search/da) and "i" (https://jisho.org/search/i), each of which has 3-5 meanings, and tell me which combination of possible words is the company's name derived from? There's literally no way to tell.

[1] https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/36909

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how language works. Determining the etymology of a name is not possible in any language.

What combination of words was "Xerox" derived from? Does that affect the meaning of "Xerox"?

How about "Samuel"?

"Rachel"?

"Ted"?

I was originally thinking about names that have intended meanings "Target", "Burger King", "Taco bell", "Pager Duty", "DuckDuckGo", "Texas Instruments", "Aperture Laboratories" etc.

> Note that it immediately implies that oral communication in English and Japanese is impossible.

Only if people communicate without context. A large amount of ambiguity can be removed by understanding the context of the conversation.

You haven't described a difference between oral and written communication.

I am responding to your comment that oral communication is impossible because of homonyms. I am not covering the difference between oral and written communication.

That is not something any of my comments says. On the contrary, I identified it as "incredibly stupid".

The spelling of English words gives you two separate clues:

1. How it is pronounced.

2. Its etymology and what it means.

Because pronunciation has changed over time and changes across regions, these two features are in conflict. If we made spelling uniformly reflect (current, in some given place) pronunciation, then we would lose clues as to etymology and meaning.

For example, an English speaker can reasonably guess that "native", "nation" have related meanings because of the shared "nat". If we made the spelling follow pronunciation and did "naytiv" and "nayshun", some of that is lost.

Ideally, pronunciation would be fixed across time and place so that a language's spelling reliably reflected both meaning and sound. But that ain't how humans work.

In written languages that do this "better", it's mainly through some combination of:

1. The written language is simply younger than written English and thus has had less time for pronunciation to diverge.

2. The language is used by a smaller, more homogeneous community.

3. Elites exert political force to prevent pronunciation or meaning from changing and to reject loanwords at the loss of expressivity.

English does none of those things. It's been around a long time, has spread throughout the world across widely disparate communities, and is happy to absorb any good idea it finds in any other language. It is the Perl of written languages, for better or worse.

By the way, meaning also drifts over time.

You just "decimated" his proposal.

4. Spelling reforms have been introduced to amend the orthography to rationalise it and better reflect current pronunciation.

This is what some people advocate for English - entirely misguidedly in my view.

Why misguidedly, in your view?

The usual argument against spelling reform is that it isn't possible to do it in a way that is compatible with the language of more than one region. For example, in Australian English they have a system of phonemic vowel length. This does not exist in other varieties of English, so the options you have in a spelling reform are (1) ignore the Australians and set spellings that are ambiguous in Australia, or (2) placate the Australians and include their vowels in the reformed spelling system, despite the fact that this leaves everyone else in the world mystified as to why certain words are spelled with doubled vowels and certain words aren't.

Start small, and use compromises. Don't try to be completely phonetic, which won't work for the reasons you mentioned.

You can start by undoing misguided spelling reforms of the past. "Debt" used to be spelled "det" but due to incorrectly inferred etymology it was changed to be non-phonetic. There are many words like these.

Then look for major inconsistencies where a cluster of letters is pronounced more than one way, and simplify one of them. For example, "ough" is pronounced as in "tough" more often than as in "though". Change "tough" to be spelled as "tuff" and "rough" as "ruff".

Going further, embrace text/informal writing and use tho, altho, nite, tonite, etc. Although the last two are not necessary since "ight" is pretty consistent. Keep common clusters of letters so that it still looks like English. Do it in in stages over a 100 years , making changes every 15 years or so. I'm mostly aiming at ease of reading vs ease of writing.

Every other major language had a recognized central authority to do its work. Spanish, French, written Chinese, etc. all had a monarchy/dictatorship of some sort to mandate the change and enforce its use.

England could have done it perhaps in Shakespeare's time or shortly thereafter, but once English spread across the globe in its modern (lack of) form with no recognized central authority with the power to force the change, it's not going to happen.

You couldn't get three states in the United States to agree on a universal spelling/pronunciation let alone the three countries in the United Kingdom. You think you'll have any more success over continents and across oceans?

Good luck!

> Spanish, French, written Chinese, etc. all had a monarchy/dictatorship of some sort to mandate the change and enforce its use.

There is no central authority over the Spanish language since the days of Bolivar and San Martin (1810s or so). Modern e.g. Argentinians would laugh at the idea that Real Academia Española has any say on how they should use their language. And indeed, there are differences not just in vocabulary and pronunciation, but also in grammar: "vos hablás" instead of "tú hablas".

Nevertheless, I can pick pretty much any written Spanish word and know how it sounds both in European and Argentinian Spanish.

It is specifically English which failed at the task of not being like Chinese.

The spelling of English definitely doesn't give enough clues about how a word is pronounced.

Me, and millions of other speakers of English as a second language, will vehemently disagree with that point.

The rest of your comment reads like a detailed attempt at rationalization of this untrue affirmation.

As a counterargument, take Spanish. Spanish is not younger than English, pronunciation has diverged and for example someone from Cuba and someone from Argentina pronounce many words differently.

The Spanish-speaking world is by no means small, or homogeneous.

And we absorb loanwords like madmen. Mostly from English, but also French, Japanese, Italian, etc.

The point is: Spanish is a much more phonetic language in its written form than English, so much that we have no spelling bees.

English simply fucked up itself with the great vowel shift, that's all.

Spanish is in fact younger. The language was standardized and normalized by royal edict about 500 years ago. While strongly based on Castilliano, it was not the same. "Spanish" as a single cohesive, consistent language did not exist before then in Spain or anywhere else.

By comparison, the rules and structures of English (such as they are) were not altered significantly following the great vowel shift in Chaucer's time. Mostly minor spelling changes and word choice.

All languages adopt foreign words unless there is an active body attempting to prevent it, such as the French Language Academy.

French words are not however just loaned to English. It was thoroughly baked in following the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when the nobility all spoke French for hundreds of years. Basically every "fancy" word in English came directly from French while "plain" words came from Anglo Saxon (Germanic) or other related sources. Incarcerated vs jailed. Debris vs trash. Magnificent vs great. "The player regarded his opponent." vs. "The player looked at his opponent." (French for "He looks" is "Il regarde".

The great vowel shift didn't mess up English; the lack of concerted normalization of English is what did it in. English is the greatest pragmatist without design of all world languages.

« Even Korean is more phonetic than English»

Well, that’s a strange statement. Hangul is not just better by accident, it’s designed to be an advanced phonetic system making it possible to write many languages. You can learn in a few evenings, no need to know Korean, and you will be able to read Korean perfectly out loud without understanding what you are saying.

Hangul is phonetic, but doesn't have the capability to represent all phonetic sounds of a language. For example, Hindi has 4 distinct letters and consequently sounds for the each of D and T (D: ड ढ द ध, T: ट ठ त थ), which all correspond to the single Hangul letter diot (ㄷ). I have Korean friends who write their names in the Chinese script because they don't have the necessary letters to represent the sounds.

I don't think there is any language which can represent all the phonetic sounds of other languages.

bluesmoon is right. Hangul doesn't solve all problems ever, anyways, here is some miscellaneous trivia. I have Korean friends. You're welcome Max-q. Please don't try to appreciate things around bluesmoon. You know how they get.

I don't think that's right. One example would be the words with the same spelling which are pronounced differently depending on meaning (e.g. dragonfly and sleeping spot), you have to know what you are saying to pronounce it correctly.

> It is "a guess" at best, and that guess won't be correct most of the time, unless you know the word already. And when you don't, you'll be dealing with all kinds of Cansas/Arcansas and although/drought/through/bought/cough/enough most of the time.

"Most of the time" is an exaggeration. English is (sadly) less strictly phonetic than many other languages, but still highly phonetic. Nearly every word in your own comment can be pronounced phonetically.

"-ough" vs "-ought" are not a problem since they are different, and this there can be a consistent no-exceptions rule distinguish a them.

Same as "sch" and "tsch" are pronounced differently in German but are still considered phonetic.

Although/through/ebough is a problem tho. I wish the general public cared enuff to push a spelling reform thru.

> "Most of the time" is an exaggeration.

"Most" like "cost", or like "ghost?" Also, only now I checked the transcription for "exaggeration", and "gg" is not "g", like in "blogger", but ʤ like in "Jason". TIL.

If this is not "most of the time", than I don't know what is.

English is obviously your first language. No one learning English as a second (or more) language would ever make such a ludicrous assertion.

https://youtu.be/Mfz3kFNVopk

English is not learned; it's memorized.

English has had a long trip to the language it is today. It doesn't help that at the latter stages of its development writers disagreed on or disregarded the rules of spelling.

> In e.g. Russian or German, you can read the word from the way it is written and maybe miss the accent.

OK, but... the position of the word stress in Russian radically alters the pronunciation of all the vowels in the word. Missing the stress means mangling the whole word. That's not something to just dismiss.

I wasn't claiming English is the best language. I was saying non pictographic languages are one of humanity's most important inventions, which is one reason they've spread so rapidly everywhere.

Too bad non pictographic languages weren't paired with simple orthogonal grammars and consistent spelling rules. Learning different languages always feel like choosing whether I want to beat myself up with my left fist, my right fist, or my feet.

It's not like the Chinese didn't know about alphabetic scripts. Alphabets predate Chinese writing.

Chinese is written the way it is for roughly the same reasons why English doesn't use phonetic spelling.

Alphabets do not predate Chinese writing. L

"Chinese writing" is clerical script and later. That's like a full 1000 years after the first Semitic scripts.

You are right. When years ago apple was said to introduce "emoji", the arstechnica article I was reading was explaining what the hell emojis are. They were like " it is a pictographical language like Chinese or hieroglyphic where each "idea" is represented by a single picture" and I simply could not wrap my head around it...

Do I have to learn a new language altogether? How ? Will it fit on a keyboard? How many ideas can there be? What if I have to say something longer? What if I have to say a difficult concept?

This was "before" emoji came out on iOS.

Rest is history

Languages have different dimensions, including spelling, pronunciation, conjugation, grammar. English is moderately easy in spelling and pronunciation, but with exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions, it is harder than say Korean. Mandarin has more difficult spelling and pronunciation than English, but the low number of conjugations and tenses makes it much easier grammatically than English.

Mandarin actually has a great deal of pronunciation hints. It’s barely worse than English at this, which isn’t saying much.

I like that. Mine is boustrophedon. When you get to the end of a line, you continue the next line starting at the same end. I know the ancient Greeks used it. I don't know who else. I keep pondering how hard it would be to write a text editor that handled that correctly.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon

> speed up reading as the eyeballs don't need to jump across the page to start a new line :-)

Reminds me of dot matrix printers... some could write lines from right to left without needing to go back to start of line, thus alternating directions.

As a kid I thought if i write English in a mirrored way i.e. right to left, & mirrored, it would be my code script, nobody else can read it. People read it very easily.

That’s how Leonardo wrote, because he was left-handed, so it was more practical — it preventing smudging the writing with the wrist.

(Except Leonardo didn’t write in English.)

Not just smudging. The entire mechanical act of writing (and everything) is optimized for left handed operation being the mirror image of right-handed operation, since left is mirror image of right.

That was usually in draft mode, since the left-to-right and right-to-left lines wouldn't quite line up perfectly.

Only LF and no CR? Sounds Unixy enough for me.

"At the one-time expense of having to learn to recognize letters and words both ways"

That is a very expensive expense, though. And the result might still be worse.

I can quickread a page in a couple of seconds, because my brain memorized the shape of the words and even sentences. It took me years of lots of reading to achieve that. I am not sure if my brain could handle the double amount of shapes, because this is in effect what would be needed. And eye movement is very quick. But feel free to give the experiment a shot and share results.

(it should be trivial to write a script that rearranges text that way)

> That is a very expensive expense, though. And the result might still be worse.

That's entirely possible but it is hard to tell without going through the entire learning process. There might be a lot of redundancy (as we can quickly recognize mirror shapes) which if tapped at an early age might make it actually a trivial "add-on".

Anecdotally you can learn within minutes to slowly parse script in reverse order. Whether you can ever get to the same speed is not clear. We do know that some cultures did use alternating script (so its clearly not impossible) but we also know that they abandoned it in the end - so there might be some disadvantages.

Maybe the reason for eventually adopting uniform LR or RL instead or alternating is not the difficulty of mastering mirror versions, but being able to quickly start reading from any line on a page. For example finding the spot where you left reading, or scanning to find a relevant part. For this task the alternating form is actually less efficient as you need to jump back and forth as you go down (or up :-) the page.

It shouldn't be too hard to make a chrome pluggin to render comment threads like this in alternative forward and mirror / backward lines. As you say reading mirror writing isn't too hard so you could sort of slowly get good at it while wasting time on HN anyway. Would be a fun silly project might give it a go.

The runic script (futhark) could also be written l2r and r2l in alternating lines.

This seems pretty efficient as there's no deadheading to get back to the other end of the line. When doing puzzles like word searches or scanning things laid out in grids like news article headlines, I do this l2r->r2l type of scanning. I've even caught myself using t2b->b2t scanning as well in these types of situations. It's just much more efficient

Wow Boustrophedon looks really interesting. Thanks! I asked GPT4 to write a Haiku about Elon Musk in that style. It gave me this:

Elon's cosmic sound (⇒)

⇐ Spacetime symphony thrives

Starward notes resound (⇒)

There’s also scripts written bottom to top (Libyc), and even stranger scripts which are written and read in different directions (Hanunó'o is generally written bottom to top — carved away from the writer really — but read left to right).

Interesting side note “boustrophedon” translates roughly into “writing as the ox plows” hence the zigzag.

But left-to-right kinda is a law of nature: most people are right-handed, and to avoid messing with previously written glyphs it is natural to move to the right.

As a native arabic reader, Mongolian gives me headaches. My brain keeps seeing it as an unreadable arabic script rotated 45 degrees to the left. (It also turns out it does have some arabic influence[0])

Still fascinating and super cool.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script

No kidding! At some point Genghis Khan invaded Afghanistan. Over the next century Pax Mongolica made it as far as Egypt. Conquered swathes of Persia, felt cute, sacked Baghdad. Just Mongol things.

Splintered into a bunch of Khanates that started fighting each other..

Arguably they fell apart because they picked up so many scripts and cultural and religious influences the different types of Mongols could no longer communicate or tolerate one another. Then the bubonic plague came and they became insular again instead of expansionist.

Indeed. The fall of Baghdad [0] during that century at the hand of Hulagu Khan[1], the grandson of Gengis Khan, is thought to be a critical turning point that ended the islamic golden age and drove the eastern islamic caliphate to a dark age Iraq and other descendant countries never fully recovered from.

<graphic warning> According to some accounts, Hulagu cut open the belly of the Caliph Al-Musta'sim, pulled his guts and left them on top of the caliph's head to drip while he was slowly dying. Some other accounts relate that he was killed by horse trampling wrapper in a rug.</graphic warning>

It's also fascinating that Mongols, with all their mighty army, would settle in a land upon invading it, marrying into the locals, adopting their religion and traditions. Some modern Russian, Turk and Persian populations have this "reverse influence" from past Mongol invasions and admixture with actual Mongol people. Tatars[2] are a notable example, a Russo-Turko-Mongol population descending from Golden Horde troops who settled around the Volga (as everything in ethnographics, this is contested).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulagu_Khan

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Tatars

The Mongoles did some horrible things. In the Shahr-e-Gholghola, when the grandson of Gengis Khan was killed, he ordered that everyone in the city be killed, including children in cribs. As if that was not enough, they left the city and returned a few days to kill any survivors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahr-e_Gholghola

"Arguably they fell apart because they picked up so many scripts and cultural and religious influences the different types of Mongols could no longer communicate or tolerate one another. "

Interesting thought and it certainly had influence, but I would argue that the trope that one strong ruler conquers a big kingdom, but it doesn't stay united, because his heirs cannot settle on the next great king, is a quite common and often repeated one.

Same here. It seems like my brain is trying to process it as Arabic and "find" the patterns when there are none?

Yes and right when my brain thinks it found something it could make sense of, my head tries intuitively to tilt to the left and I have to forcefully resist it.

Even as a non-arabic reader my head still wants to tilt 45 degrees automatically.

But probably in the wrong direction, unless you've internalized that Arabic is written right to left.

You mean 90 degrees right?

I can't read arabic at all and this gives me a strong impression of being on its side too.

Not-native Arabic reader here. To my eyes, it pretty clearly has a "baseline" that, if you tilted the text 45° to the right, would run along the "bottom". With this in mind, the similarity of many characters and ligatures to those in Arabic is striking.

Incidentally, having listened to a few clips of the language, it sounds like it has a slight Arabic tinge in some words. And otherwise reminds me of Russian, and sometimes Hangul.

It doesn't really help that they use Arabic numerals and rotate them 90 degrees.

As a native Syriac speaker, saying Mongolian has Arabic influence is like saying it has Hebrew influence.

Syriac =/= Arabic. And Mongolian is influenced by Syriac not Arabic

and if you are wondering :) yes, a lot of letters ARE Syriac rotated 45 degrees

That’s a super fancy !=

that's a good attempt to represent the original "not equal" symbol ≠ better than <> used by t-sql

And pascal!

<> is simply "<" or ">" in the same way you have >= (">" or "=") and <= ("<" or "=").

It's obviously not meant to look like ≠.

Unfortunately, touchpad scrolling on this specific website is basically unusable for what I believe is a very large fraction of laptop users because:

(a) it does scrolljacking, which cannot be done well on the web (it doesn’t expose the right primitives) so sites should never do it¹ but find some other way;

(b) its scrolljacking implementation is considerably worse than is possible; and

(c) it intercepts all scrolling, rather than leaving horizontal scrolling alone and only redirecting vertical scrolling.

Fortunately, I browse the web with JavaScript disabled by default, so I’m fine other than when I’m checking this out!

(I noted this a couple of years back in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27758336, and I don’t think the site’s implementation has changed at all since then; Firefox exhibits the same symptoms, Chromium has changed to behave somewhat more like Firefox now.)

—⁂—

¹ Sites, as distinct from apps; there are a few sorts of apps that can’t avoid it and must do the best they can, e.g. maps; incidentally, Google Maps has the only consistently-decent scrolljacking implementation for web-based maps that I’ve ever found.

Surprised there’s not a Cyrillic version. As far as I know, most Mongolian people can’t fluently read that script.

Edit: Apparently the government is pushing for increased use of the Mongolian alphabet in official documents.

Don't worry, they will learn as quickly as they quickly learned the Cyrillic alphabet, which appeared in Mongolia in 1940 only. And for this it will not be necessary to kill as many people in the "purges" as they were killed by the "Choibalsan's troikas".

I'm pretty sure the majority of the Mongolian people were illiterate before then, since education was mostly limited to monks.

don't mention the Celtic language, you will break the immersion in your narrative

> Surprised there’s not a Cyrillic version.

Well, when you access https://president.mn/mng/, it would be weird for them to give you the version of the page that you asked not to get.

Go to https://president.mn/ and it's all Cyrillic.

What's the surprise?

Probably, the person you are responding to does not understand that "mng" in the URL means "Mongolian written in the Mongolian script" and did not guess either that the letters "MN" at bottom left meant "Mongolian written in the Cyrillic script".

And why would they?

The biggest surprise here is your answer, IMO.

Fair enough, that makes sense. I’d clocked there was a language toggle to the English version but didn’t think to remove the path. Thanks for the heads up!

It isn't actually a toggle, but a pair of links to the other two versions, MN and EN. EN version has two links as well, to MN and MNG versions.

I was fascinated to learn there are more Mongolians living in China than in Mongolia.

They still learn the traditional Mongolian script.

There was some uproar a few years back when the government required core classes like math and science to be taught in Chinese, but the rest is still taught in Mongolian.

Mongolian script is also printed on Chinese currency, in addition to Tibetan, Uyghur, and Zhuang.

>I was fascinated to learn there are more Mongolians living in China than in Mongolia.

*Mongols. They are Chinese Mongols. Not Mongolian nationals living in China.

PS: Not trying to be the "actually" guy, I'm making the correction because I was confused at first so I had to look it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongols_in_China

Literally the first line of the Wikipedia article:

> Mongols in China or Mongolian Chinese

The link was timing out for me (HN hug of death?), so here's an archived version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230421094510/https://president...

It's crazy that HN can accidentally DDoS the official site of a foreign head of state.

I still dont understand how most site in 2023 cant handle HN traffic. Especially when they are static pages. The HN burst of traffic isn't as high as most people imagine.

Interesting to note numerals are still Arabic, but written vertically. Does that mean that in school Mongolian kids learn to write digits sideways? Would be pretty cool :D

edit: e.g. here: https://president.mn/mng/?p=7112

Some time ago I lived with a Mongolian student for a while and I was really surprised to find out that Cyrillic is the default alphabet in the country.

My language is written in Cyrillic and while most Cyrillic languages come from the same Slavic language family, Mongolian has very little similarities with the rest.

The same used to be true of the Romanian Principalities until the middle of the 19th century, when we switched to Latin alphabet in order to underline our Romance-language roots and to culturally distance ourselves from the expanding Tsarist Empire.

Of course, the Soviet Republic of Moldova used the Cyrillic writing for Romanian throughout most of its existence, the people over there switching to Latin alphabet in the dying days of the Soviet Union was a prelude to their independence (I have two books in Romanian and using Latin alphabet published in the Soviet Republic of Moldova towards the end of the ‘80s - 1990, priced in rubles and all, really cool).

Kazakh, Kyrgyz and many other languages are written with Cyrillic due to Soviet and Russian colonization efforts.

It's optimized to be read on the horseback, you lean on the right or left to see beside the horses head and you can read the articles!

with the writing-mode property

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/writing-mod...

Yep, specifically this uses writing-mode: vertical-lr and text-orientation: sideways-right.

any idea why there is a minor shift in line-height if we remove the text-orientation property.

I’m not seeing that in Firefox at least. Bug in your browser of choice?

seems to be a bug in firefox developer version, works fine in chrome.

Work remains to be done. The page title is rendered sideways.

(Not that the space exists in the browser to render titles vertically...)

I love how this makes the usage of screen real-estate very efficient. You can some entire articles without having to scroll the page. I also love how landscape images fit neatly in this configuration.

It is very tempting to try to make a website that uses this configuration for english text.

Also, even though it is the very first time I see this script, I can tell that the website is very well done (well, it's the website of the president of the country, but still).

...and Google Translate misidentifies it as simplified Chinese :(

to be fair, google translate misidentifies a lot of input if instructions are unclear.

And I think it's acceptable that they do not offer transcription for all the foreign scripts. Though helpful it would be, it's also very likely to make many mistakes.

  <html lang="en-US">

at the start of the page won't be helping.

these is also an option for english via hyperlink at bottom left of page, for https://president.mn/en/

When I loaded the page, the pagination numbers were in English, but the page text was in Mongolian script. About 2 seconds later, the page reloaded and showed everything in Mongolian.

Adguard is blocking the page https://reports.adguard.com/en/president.mn/report.html?aid=...

Fixed it, thanks

Impressive monitoring of the forum

It doesn't fully work on my phone, which really makes me wonder how easy it would be to use digital devices as a Mongolian, who only speaks Mongolian, and no other language.

Here is the writing process in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m0ak3c2XK4

This is so cool - love to see non-Latin script being treated as a first class citizen.

writing-mode support is pretty good these days. Here is another website in the wild using it for vertical text, mixed with horizontal text: http://ko.scp-wiki.net/gumiho

I wish it was easy to render western text to multiple columns that are fit to the screen. Reading like a multicolumn paper newspaper and scrolling horizontally. I think this shows that it would be pleasant to read text on the web this way.

You can find plenty more examples on the Japanese web (top to bottom but also RTL)

Does it cause for anyone else what it does for me -- the whole screen "vibrating" when you reach the limits of the horizontal scroll, or somewhat even while you're scrolling?

It does that for me on a laptop, but only if I'm scrolling with a trackpad instead of a mouse.

I have to lock rotation and turn it landscape to read this not only that, you have to scroll all the way to the top first to start reading. /sarcasm

It's really interesting that the numbers are sideways, I wonder if they actually write them that way or if it's just a quirk of the web.

The interesting thing is that Cyrillic is the official script in Mongolia and original mongolian script survive in China.

Dual-English Arabic ads in UAE always make me do a double-take because of date order:

    Prime Day
    24-23
    يوم برايم

Google translate really struggles with this page. Only thing it manages to get out is "The" a few times!

lmao.

Copy pasting this, from that page, into Google Translate:

> ᠮᠣᠩ᠋ᠭᠣᠯ ᠤᠯᠤᠰ ᠤᠨ ᠶᠡᠷᠦᠩᠬᠡᠢᠢᠯᠡᠭᠴᠢ ᠤᠬᠤᠨ ᠠ ᠢᠢᠨ ᠬᠦᠷᠡᠯᠰᠦ᠋ᠬᠡ ᠡᠷᠳᠡᠨᠢᠪᠦᠷᠢᠨ ᠦ ᠤᠰᠤᠨ ᠴᠠᠬᠢᠯᠭᠠᠨ ᠰᠲ᠋ᠠᠨᠼ ᠪᠠᠷᠢᠭᠳᠠᠬᠤ ᠭᠠᠵᠠᠷ ᠲᠤ ᠠᠵᠢᠯᠯᠠᠬᠤ ᠦᠶ ᠡ ᠪᠡᠷ ᠡᠷᠴᠢᠮ ᠬᠦᠴᠦᠨ ᠦ ᠰᠠᠢᠢᠳ ᠪ᠂ ᠴᠣᠢᠢᠵᠢᠯᠰᠦ᠋ᠷᠦᠩ ᠡᠷᠴᠢᠮ ᠬᠦᠴᠦᠨ ᠦ ᠬᠠᠩ᠋ᠭᠠᠮᠵᠢ ᠢᠢᠨ ᠥᠨᠥ ᠢᠢᠨ ᠪᠠᠢᠢᠳᠠᠯ᠂ ᠴᠢᠨᠠᠭᠰᠢᠳᠠ ᠢᠢᠨ ᠲᠥᠯᠥᠪ ᠦᠨ ᠲᠠᠯ ᠠ ᠪᠠᠷ ᠲᠣᠪᠴᠢ ᠲᠠᠨᠢᠯᠴᠠᠭᠤᠯᠪᠠ᠃

> ᠮᠣᠩ᠋ᠭᠣᠯ ᠤᠯᠤᠰ ᠬᠡᠷᠡᠭᠴᠡᠭᠡᠲᠦ ᠡᠷᠴᠢᠮ ᠬᠦᠴᠦᠨ ᠦ ᠪᠡᠨ 80 ᠬᠤᠪᠢ ᠢᠢ ᠳᠣᠲᠣᠭᠠᠳᠤ ᠳᠤ ᠪᠠᠨ ᠦᠢᠯᠡᠳᠪᠦᠷᠢᠯᠡᠵᠦ᠂

Results:

> - The - - ᠯ ᠠᠪᠠᠷ ᠲᠣᠪᠴᠢ ᠲᠠᠨᠢᠯᠴᠠᠭᠤᠯᠪᠠ᠃

> 80 ᠲᠣᠭᠠᠳᠤᠳᠤᠪᠠᠨ ᠦᠢᠯᠡᠳᠪᠦᠷᠢᠯᠡᠵᠦ᠂

Copy-pasting it into GPT-4 and asking for a translation:

> "Mongolia's heroic history of the ancient period, from the time when heroes ruled the land, has left many great legacies. Among them, the unparalleled courage and power of the heroes of that time have been passed down through generations. Today, we continue to celebrate their extraordinary achievements and admire their incredible strength, while also learning from their wisdom and following their footsteps.

> "Mongolia's heroic history spans over 80 years, during which many heroes have emerged and made their mark on the nation."

Unbelievable. Google's slipping hard on translation.

How do you know that's an actual translation and not a bunch of bullshit?

Turns out... it's a bunch of bullshit. Kinda shows just how much society here values bullshit over correctness, doesn't it?

“Mongolia's heroic history spans over 80 years” is technically true.

To be fair, it's more about Google Translate straight up doesn't support Mongolian scripts than being this bad. It only supports Mongolian language in Cyrillic.

* Surprisingly, I can't find the help article that lists all supported languages anymore. There used to be one: https://web.archive.org/web/20221205131847/https://translate...

But it has "Mongolian" as an option on its drop-down menu. It does not specify "Mongolian - Cyrillic."

But it actually is "Mongolian - Cyrillic".

It's simply mislabeled (or not clearly labeled, whatever you call it).

Classical Mongolian is actually not a straightforward 1-to-1 conversion, and it's not clear if Khalkha Mongolian and Classical Mongolian should be treated as the same language in Google (Classical Mongolian is a common writing language not just for Khalkha Mongolian used in Mongolia, but also for Buryat and, but in Cyrillic those two languages are written differently).

E.g. the first line of a poem from linguamongolia.com, "saiqan časutu čağan ağulan-dur" (see http://www.linguamongolia.com/reso1.html , White Mountains document for original script) would be written "сайхан цаст цагаан уулд" (saihan cast cağan uuld) in Khalkha Mongolian orthography, if I'm not mistaken.

But then, sometimes Google Translate is happily combining two languages. E.g. it can translate from Crimean Tatar, but it will detect it as Tatar, even though it's a different language...

I copied it into GPT-4 and it gave me:

---snip---

The Mongolian script reads:

Монгол улс үнд эрх чөлөөлөгчүүдийн өөрийн аймагтай холбоотой зарим нийтлэл, сурталчилгааны станцуудыг харж буй газар дээр ажиллаж байна. Энэ берхчлэнгүүдийг судлан, шинэчлэх зорилгоор эрхэм хуваарь болон төлөвлөгөө өөрчлөн, цалингийн шагналыг нэмэгдүүлсэн болно. Чиний байдал, ажил хийж байгаа тал амьдралын түвшинд туслах гарцыг танилцуулж байна.

Монгол улс хөгжлийн төслийг эрхэм хуваарь болон сан 80 хубитай ийм дотоодын төсөл дээр ажиллаж байгаа уулзалт болно.

In English, the translation is:

The Mongolian state is working on certain publications and broadcasting stations related to their province in the area they are visiting. These activists are researching and aiming to innovate, updating their important schedule and planning, and increasing their salary. They introduce the help they provide in the aspect of the living standards where they are working.

Is the Mongolian state working on an internal project with an 80-million budget for development with an important schedule and planning?

---snap---

edit: I pasted it into a second chat and then it gave me:

---snip2---

The Mongolian script you've provided appears to be in Classical Mongolian, which is written vertically. Here is my attempt at translating the text into English:

The Mongolian nation has a long and rich history, and the customs and culture of the people have been passed down from generation to generation. The land is vast and diverse, with many different landscapes and natural wonders to explore. Over the centuries, the Mongolian people have overcome many challenges and have continued to adapt and grow, forging a strong and unique identity.

Mongolia has a proud heritage that dates back over 80 years, and the people have always been resilient and determined in the face of adversity.

---snap2---

Wow. They only agree with “Mongolia “ and the number 80

Damn, so it's just completely making stuff up.

Can confirm, pasted it into 3.5 and it came up with something totally different.

This is what the AI industry hand-waves away as "hallucinations". The first GPT authored book could be titled "Lying with Confidence".

> Unbelievable. Google's slipping hard on translation.

It's true. Google Translate has some stiff competition in LLMs. It needs to start making up translations out of whole cloth if it wants to catch up.

If aliens had an Earth Embassy, this is what it's website would look like. I mean, it looks great, but it's just so different.

Ясан гоё юм бэ? Монгол босоо бичгийг internet дээрэнд харч дуртай шүү. Хэдэн жилийн турш тэр бичгийг уншиж сурсан, харин одоо бараглаж бүр мартчихлаа

I love seeing this stuff on the internet, i wish i could read it as well as i used to.

What does it say?

Blessed are the cheesemakers.

It is not meant to be taken literally, it refers to all manufacturers of dairy products.

Really? Interesting. I wonder how many presidents in the world actually value who produces the food we eat.

Considering the massive government subsidies the farmers in the West are enjoying, I would say the answer to your question is, quite a few.

Indeed you have a point.

Is there a president out there that doesn't pander to agribusiness?

Omg, I love the way this was handled. Impressive and well thought out.

One thing is sure, I would not want to be a UI dev in Mongolia...

Oh, I recently moved to Israel, and at first was shocked with how much worse design in general is. Like, typography, ads and of course UI. There are maybe 3-4 common fonts used everywhere, and I think it's a common problem for "rare" scripts. It seems you need some "critical mass" of visual content to come up with good design practices and figure out what looks good in your cultural landscape.

My first thought was about how browser tabs would be displayed.

How does Mongolian IDE look like?

Yo this looks cool as hell

would this need some special treatment for SEO?

Why would it?

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