symbols

The standard alphabet, with ' and ,.

Diacritics, alternate symbols, other

Handwriting: .

Direction of writing

the wind: left to right, top to bottom

Symbol:

The standard direction of writing is left to right, top to bottom, as in western scripts.

the rain / the icicles: top to bottom, left to right

Symbol:

Another much used direction is top to bottom, left to right. Usually, this is accomplished by rotating both the line and the letters 90 degrees to the right. Sometimes the tails of the letters point downwards instead of upwards: this is known as the icicle style. An alternate method is to only rotate the line, but this is rare in handwriting.

These days, this direction of writing is mostly used for poems, quotations, in ads and for other short texts.

the fan: bottom to top, left to right

Symbol:

or

This is the rarest direction of writing. It is solely used on very formal occasions: in invitations to important ceremonies like the child-naming ceremony, the coming-of-age ceremony, weddings and funerals, state dinners... in theological texts, lawbooks, and a few, renowned certificates and awards... in calligraphy as graffiti on buildings in standalone quotes and short poems There must be an odd number of lines in a fan, and no more than nine lines is allowed, three is the most common.

If a fanned text has more than one section, like a poem having more than one verse, each section of text gets its own fan, and the fans are stocked either in a line, or in pyramid-like structures. One reads a pyramid by reading each row of fans left to right, from the top fan to the bottom right fan. There can at most be five per line and seven per pyramid.

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