Disclaimer: The premise of this question might be flawed, but I’m throwing it out there anyway.
I was on the bus this morning as I am every work day when a woman next to me was reading a book written in Arabic – perhaps the Qur’an or something. Anyway, I thought about something as I glanced over at it. Arabic is written right to left. So how do those who write natively in Arabic actually write?
When I was growing up and my left-handedness was revealed to be other than the norm, I was informed that the primary reason we are taught to write with our right hands is because English (and Latin derivatives among others) is written left to right, and writing with the right hand lets you clearly see what you’re writing as you write it and prevents your hand from smudging the ink as you write. Made sense to me but didn’t do anything to change my left-handedness.
So now I wonder. If we are culturally raised to write with our right hand because of the direction our language is written in, what of Arabic? It’s written right to left, so would that mean that those who are brought up to write in Arabic would predominantly be taught to write with the left hand? And what about Japanese Kanji? Written top to bottom, would that suggest a higher percentage of ambidexterity – or at least a smaller disparity between left and right handedness?
I think handedness is mostly congenital and/or environmental.
My daughter is left-handed; both my wife and I are right. When DD was born, she came out so quick that her shoulders didn’t have time to reshape. Because of this, her right clavicle (collarbone) broke. We had to keep her right arm immobilized for 2 weeks. We think in that time she developed the need for her left to be her dominant.
But I think she has some right-handedness. Once when she was four she saw some teens practicing baseball and wanted to play. So she found a stick, and I slow-pitched pine cones at her. She hit them very well. Then I noticed that she was swinging right-handedly. I asked her to turn around, and pitched some more. She hit those too! I have a switch-hitter! :D:D
To my knowledge, Arabic cultures have a serious bias against left handedness, seeing as how the left hand is used for cleaning one’s self after using the bathroom, and it is considered taboo to shake hands, handle food, or do other simple tasks with the left hand. I seriously doubt that the right to left script has anything to do with being more tolerant of southpaws.
So is that to say that the Arabic cultural mores regarding the use of the right hand mask the tendency to write with the left, or that they make the use of the left for writing taboo? The idea that the left is used for “unsavory purposes” would make sense with handling food and handshakes, but would also suggest that the left hand is most commonly used for toolwork. If food is not to be handled with the left, then the knife that cuts it must be. This suggests a cultural propensity to use the left for utilitarian purposes, though it seems to stem from the way things are done in general rather than how language is written.
Your hand can get smudged anyway, if it’s touching the paper. I’m right handed and have had many a gray…well, there isn’t a term for it, but the part of your hand that’s actually near the paper when you write. Granted, this is more common if you go back to what you’ve already written and change it, but it can still happen anyway. If your hand touches the paper when you write, it’s going to get smudged no matter which one you use; if it doesn’t, the same applies.
There’s a lot of debate about this in cricket circles (and I assume baseball too) that maybe right-handed isn’t right-handed after all. I am a very heavily left-handed person. There are some things I do well right handed because our right handed-biased culture has forced me to (such as using a rotary telephone or certain keypads such as those on an ATM), but there is nothing I know of that I choose to do right handed if both methods are viable except certain sporting swings and stances. I use a cricket bat right handed. Ditto baseball. Ditto golf. I know I couldn’t for the life of me adopt a left handed stance and expect to hit the ball. I fire a rifle left handed, but there is just something about those bat and ball game swings that leads me to support the notion that we’ve gotten it wrong all these years.