--- Nicholas Bodley <nbodley@...> wrote:

> 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.

I also recall the right-to-left CJK thread here or
elsewhere. A couple of days ago I had a 1 day stopover
in Narita, Japan and visited the 1,000 year old
Buddhist temple there where I noticed at least one
inscription written right-to-left. There were
doubtless more but I only recognize a few hundred
characters and only a few dozen reliably.

> [...]
> > 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.

Really? To me it seems they rely heavily on the stroke
count and also on either pronunciation (reading) or
radical. How does stroke order come into play?

> 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.

For me looking up characters in a Chinese or Japanese
dictionary is very painstaking and I use all my
knowledge to try to speed up the process, including
possibly my knowledge of stroke order to take stabs at
which elements the unknown character might be composed
of. Or maybe I take stroke order into account when
trying to count the strokes.

Andrew Dunbar.

> >> 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
>
>
>
>
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http://en.wiktionary.org -- http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl



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