How is chinese written vertically

Note the rotation of the Latin letters and Arabic numerals when written with the vertical text. Meiji-era offices of Nintendo , with its sign written right-to-left migi yokogaki. The slogans on Tiananmen " Long live the People's Republic of China " and " Long live the unity of the people of the world " are written in Simplified Chinese from left to right. An unfolded Chinese bamboo book featuring text written vertically along the strips of bamboo.

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Cite this article:. Participants, when asked to reflect on their behavior, reported arranging these pictures mainly based on their reading and writing habits. And as all participants were residing in the United States at the time of data collection, it is possible that the Chinese and Taiwanese speakers were more likely to use LR due to exposure to English writing.

However, when we did a median split of Chinese and Taiwanese participants based on the length of time they had been residing in the United States, we found no significant difference between the two halves. The RL result may relate to the secondary direction of standard writing in Taiwan; while it is primarily written from TB, each column is placed to the left of the preceding one.

Other response types BT and CW, for example , elicited responses not specific to writing. Some BT participants explained that growing things go from BT, while some CW participants evoked the cyclicity of growth and reproduction.

Aside from writing direction, there are also a few linguistic features that distinguish the Standard Mandarin spoken in Mainland China and Taiwan, including lexical differences, and some of these might in principle be responsible for the difference in behavior we found.

We cannot conclusively rule out all differences as potential factors, but we can look at the most relevant possible difference, which would be metaphorical language for time. If Taiwanese speakers use a preponderance of vertical language for time, while Mainland Chinese speakers use relatively little vertical metaphorical time language, then this possible confound could explain the Taiwanese tendency to represent time TB.

However, corpus research shows that in fact Taiwanese speakers use relatively little vertical time language, about half as much as horizontal metaphorical time language Chen, , which matches or may even be less frequent than vertical time language in Mainland China Rong, So differences in how time is construed metaphorically are unlikely to account for the difference in responses we observed; they would in fact predict the opposite effect if anything.

However, the existence of vertical time language in both dialects might help to explain why a small portion of Chinese participants placed the earliest picture at the top and the latest at the bottom, while no English participants did so. The direction of a writing system affects production of sequential arrangements. For English participants, the exceptionless LR pattern demonstrates that spatial representations for sequences take left as the beginning, proceeding toward the right, while this tendency is slightly less strong among Mainland Chinese participants.

On the assumption that there are no innate biological differences distinguishing the populations with respect to their preferred spatializations of time, there must be differences in the experiences members of these different populations have that lead to the differences in behavior.

These other factors may include differences in cultural values and practices. Since Mainland China and Taiwan share the same language, many core cultural values, traditions, and much of their history, if it were any of these cultural factors other than writing direction that were causing differences between English and Taiwanese participants, Chinese participants should pattern with Taiwanese participants.

Yet, as we have seen, the behavior of the Chinese participants is closely aligned with that of the English participants and different from that of the Taiwanese participants. Despite the similarity of Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese culture, it might still be that other cultural factors, and not just writing system orientation, are responsible for the effects reported above. In order to further understand exactly what the causes of these cross-linguistic differences are, the same experiments might be conducted with prelinguistic children or illiterate adults, who would have less experience with writing systems, and thus would be less influenced by them.

If it is truly writing orientation that is the major factor in the results described above, then the effect of native language should disappear with such participants. Another way to pursue this line of research further would be to experimentally introduce experience with a new writing system to participants drawn from a single population, to see whether — over time — such a manipulation could affect their spatial representation of time.

It is also possible that writing direction has effects on other cognitive operations than the representation of time. Space is used as a basis for a variety of abstract concepts, like power, morality, happiness, and so on Lakoff and Johnson, Finally, it is worth noting that the method we used did not distinguish between the representation of sequence and the representation of time per se.

It is possible that the effect we observed was the result of spatializations of sequence and not time — in that case, we might expect to find similar effects with arranging atemporal sequences, like colors, for example.

The current design leaves open the question of which of these facilities we are tapping into. To conclude, these results support the hypothesis that writing system orientation influences spatial cognition. We have seen that the location where a writing system starts is where people spatially represent the beginnings of temporal sequences.

These differences in behavior may in turn influence how we interpret the world and language about it. More broadly, it seems that writing system orientation is an idiosyncratic linguistic characteristic that can have an impact on our cognitive system in general, like other linguistic features that have relativistic effects.

The details of a language — in this case an apparently superficial feature of how people in a given culture interact with its written form, seems to shape the way that people think about something totally unrelated. Learning to use a writing system creates routines of interaction with space that affect how we map time onto it.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Boroditsky, L. Metaphoric structuring: understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition 75, 1— Does language shape thought?

Casasanto, D. Time in the mind: using space to think about time. Cognition , — Chen, J. Do Chinese and English speakers think about time differently? Failure of replicating Boroditsky Clark, H. Moore New York: Academic Press , 27— Dehaene, S. The mental representation of parity and number magnitude. CrossRef Full Text. The letters 'W3C' in the above example initially ran down the page, but applying the fullwidth transform using the following CSS makes them stand upright.

This is appropriate for initialisms, but is not necessarily useful for all types of upright text, and note especially that this technique only works for Latin characters without accents!

Using full-width characters. These will automatically be displayed upright by default. You don't need any markup in this case. Of course, this also only works for Latin script text that doesn't include accents since those are the only letters for which full-width variants exist.

Mixtures of vertical Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Mongolian text should just work as expected, but for other non-Latin scripts and Latin text with accents you will need to use the text-orientation property to make the text stand upright.

If the Latin text contains accents or diacritics as separate characters alongside their base character, you should not see the combining characters on separate lines. However, there are some scripts that present additional issues, although it should be said that these non-Latin scripts don't seem to be set upright often.

Embedded Arabic script text shown in the two right-most lines above is usually joined up. It is not possible to join Arabic characters when they are displayed upright, so isolated forms should be used. In addition, the order of characters is top to bottom when written upright, whereas Arabic script text that is rotated clockwise is read from bottom to top because it is right-to-left. Some complex scripts, such as Devanagari used for Hindi, and shown in the two left-most lines above require upright text to be split at syllable boundaries.

Such syllables are currently not handled well by browsers in upright text runs. CSS provides one more value of the text-orientation property: sideways.

This value only works if you have also applied the values of writing-mode that begin with vertical-. This value of text-orientation makes all characters lie on their right side, including Han characters.

The result of using this value with with writing-mode:vertical-rl is different from that seen when using writing-mode:sideways-lr since the text starts at the top of the block and glyphs lie on their right side.

It is more likely that you will want to use the sideways-rl and sideways-lr values of writing-mode see above to render text sideways. It is common for short numbers of digits sometimes 4 and occasionally other runs of text, to run horizontally within the vertical flow.

See the month and day digits in this example. The easiest way to apply this to numeric digits is to use text-combine-upright with a digits x value. It doesn't work for other numbering systems, such as Arabic, Bengali, etc.

This makes any double-digit numbers in the text run horizontally, but doesn't affect anything else. Note that you get the same effect by omitting the number after digits.

To fit longer numbers horizontally, change the number after digits. In the previous example is not horizontal. You could make it horizontal using text-combine-upright:digits 4.

Then any numeric sequence up to four digits long will be horizontal. Four is the maximum number of digits you can layout horizontally in vertical text using this style. If you'd like the unaffected numbers to be full-width, you can use the following styling. Full-width characters are displayed upright by default. Use dedicated markup where possible. For example, for dates and times, you could just apply the style to the time element. You can set this style on block elements such as p or section and the style will only be applied to runs of numbers.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 9 months ago. Active 9 months ago. Viewed times. Improve this question. That's why I put this comment under the OP's question, not your answer. Your answer is perfectly fine.