Arabic,  like Hebrew, is written right to left. I don’t get this. Never have. What it means for right-handers, who are most of the human race, is the risk of dragging your hand over wet ink as you move it left, left, left — over an area you’ve just written on.

The other day I was pondering this a bit more, and I wondered if the really old languages (and Hebrew and Arabic qualify) go back far enough that they began by being etched (cuneiform, etc.), pre-ink and paper … and the elites just stuck with that …

Anyway, there are one or two small advantage to living in a country where Arabic allows English to coexist with it.

And perhaps the most obvious is … “room for both languages on the same billboard/sign.

You are looking at a sign over a shop. Let’s say you are an English-speaker. From left to right, it says “Al Ghazal Landry Shop.” With the words ending a bit short of the middle of the sign.

Then, beginning on the right, and working back toward the middle … is the Arabic equivalent of “Al Ghazal Laundry Shop.” Except it would be something like pohS yrdnuaL lazahG lA.  In Arabic script, of course.

It actually is very handy.  Depending on which direction you read, your language appears to be starting on the margin that matters. The left/right.

It allows the nearly bilingual UAE to get a lot of bang out of its signs. English on the left, Arabic on the right, everybody is fine.

It is a little weird in one aspect.

Arabic in the not-too-distant past decided to print its numbers from left to right. Same as the West. They switched. But only for numbers.

Yes, it would confuse me, too.

Let’s say English did this — flipped its numbers so that they are read the opposite direction of letters/words.

The alphabet would be ABCDEFGH … But to count up from 1 would look like this: … 7654321. If we did with our numbers what the Arabs have done, the numerals for one million would appear, in print, to be 000,000,1.

Crazy, huh?

But that is what the Arabic-speaking world has done. It’s numerals now read from left to right. But not its letters/alphabet.

So, the one time you don’t look for the right to left is when looking at numbers.

But, at least, the alphabets still allow a sign-maker to use both sides of the same sign. And you can see it every day here on every billboard, every road sign, every shop sign. English and Arabic coexisting peacefully, each convinced it is getting precedence.