boustrophedon more current, not ancient?

From: Elaine Keown (keown@altavista.com)
Date: Wed Dec 20 2000 - 15:49:09 EST

Hello,
 
I studied Chinese in "horizontal, left to right mode" in Boston, but my impression is that Chinese and Japanese newspapers are still mostly written in a vertical, frequently right-to-left, boustrophedon. I know nothing whatsoever about Korean. But, of course, I am not using the word 'boustrophedon' in its usual way, to refer to text placement in script-based languages, where the script runs continuously first left-to-right and then, zipping backwards like a good fast printer, right-to-left.

Literally 'boustrophedon' refers to how an ox plows a field.

So I'm not sure if the quote below is completely accurate.........

> "Boustrophedon writing is of interest almost exclusively to scholars
> intent on reproducing the exact visual content of ancient texts. The

Elaine Keown

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