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Reading Left to Right? No Reason

English doesn't have to be read or written from left to right. It just is.

Many other languages, among them Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew, are written right to left or even bottom to top. Why, then, is English left to right?

Well, the best explanation is that the ancient Greeks said so.

Seriously, the scholars of ancient Greece experimented with the various methods of putting words on tablets and such and then reading those words. The Greeks decided that going from left to right was the easiest thing to do, the one that made the most sense. So that's what they did. And when the Romans conquered the Greeks, they kept this practice, applying it to Latin.

Most Western languages have their roots in Greek and Latin, so that's why most of those Western languages have words and sentences that progress from left to right.

 

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