Re: Left-handed CJK handwriting? (Reply to Marco)

On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 12:59:53 -0400, Marco Cimarosti
<marco.cimarosti@...> wrote:

> Nicholas Bodley [mailto:nbodley@...]
>> First, cultural; I have little or no idea about the sociology
>> of "lefties" [...]
>
> I, for one, didn't even imagine that such a thing as a "sociology of
> lefties" could exist. :-)

Maybe I misused the torm "sociology". I was referring to prejudices, folk
tales, supposed inferiorities and superiorities, handheld and
hand-operated devices, et cetera.

>> Second, for instance, the usual way to start to draw a square
>> box, iirc, is to write the top stroke left to right, keep
>> pen/brush in contact, then make the down stroke.
>> IIrc, that counts as one stroke -- a bent one.
>
> Quite right, but you forgot the left side, which is drawn first; the bent
> stroke for top and right sides is second, and the bottom stroke is last.

Thank you! A courteous correction. I try to write a CJK character only
every few weeks, if that, on average, and never learned how. Keeping
proportions is hard! It's like supervising a five-ring circus. :)

>> More generally, this has implications for several details; is
>> right-to-left (RtL) char. seq. acceptable?
>> (My guess: Only rarely)
>
> Your guess is too possibilist: such a thing absolutely forbidden.

A local restaurant (Beijing Star, iirc) has large hanzi above its front
windows, and they are written RtoL. Some time back, I asked about this,
maybe here, maybe elsewhere; I was told that RtoL sequence is occasionally
used, at least (iirc) in China, for ceremonial purposes, perhaps. Now that
I think of it, I'm reminded of the Japanese taxicabs that are (or were)
lettered front to back; that sequence is apparently much more important
than RtoL or LtoR, so the left side says "IXAT" in romaji.
[...]

> An orthodox stroke order is essential for at least two reasons:
>
> 1) Developing a readable handwriting.

[...]

> 2) Being able to look up characters in a dictionary. There are several
> ways of indexing characters, but all of them rely basically on the
> orthodox stroke order.

In the past, I've studied some of the methods; The Nelson kanji dictionary
was probably the first; I also learned about the "four-corners" scheme,
and a four-digit index (iirc), perhaps related to the "four-corners"
scheme. However, I'm relatively familiar with the usual radical and
stroke-count indices, but given a particular radical and a given number of
strokes, I'm lost and have to be patient. I'm thinking that knowledge of
stroke order might help simplify finding a given character when many have
the same radical and stroke count.

>> Of course, top down doesn't matter as much.
>
> It does matter just as much. The rules of "stroke order" determine not
> only the number, shape and direction of strokes but also, as the term
> says, their order.

I'm sorry; I was too concise, especially for the context.
What I meant was that when writing characters from top to bottom, in
columns, "lefties" shouldn't have much more difficultty that "righties",
to coin a term.

> Most radicals are on the left, but some of them are on right, top,
> bottom, or even on two or more sides.

Surely; thank you for refreshing my memory.

> It is the geometric position of components which is important for the
> stroke order, not their function.

>> It seems possible that an experienced eye could tell that CJK text was
>> written by a "leftie".
>
> Probably that's much more difficult than with Western scripts, because
> of the rigidly determined direction of brush strokes.
>
> However, it is probably possible for an experienced eye. E.g., perhaps
> the slant of vertical strokes differ slightly depending of which hand
> you used.

(IIrc, Weiben Wang clarified this. I don't want to go back to see, just
now. Trying to catch up...)

> You are probably aware that Western left-handed children, in their first
> attempts to write, have a natural tendency to write from right to left,
> mirroring all letters.

Thank you; no, I was not aware of that.

> Well, someone told me that, in Israel and Arab countries, left-handed
> children have a tendency to write from left-to-write instead!

I *love* it! (US, and maybe Brit. slang...)

> Yeah. It seems that, in the middle of the Sahara, it is not so easy to
> buy toilet paper. :-)

And water for washing is in very short supply.

>> (Btw, boustrophedon, anyone? :) )
>
> Only when eating my risotto.

:)

Thank you, indeed!

Best regards,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass. (Not "MA")
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath
Inspired, long ago, by Dr. Mario Pei's books