The Puzzle of Left-Handedness

by Rik Smits

  We will return later to the push and pull movements performed by left- and right-handed people, and to those bent nibs, inkblots and smudges, but this last assertion – that even if the script runs from right to left or top to bottom the individual letters or characters are formed from left to right – is undeniably true in the case of Hebrew and Chinese. Yet it does not at all follow that there’s anything natural about writing from left to right, or even that letters and symbols are always formed in that direction. To see this we only need to step across to Israel’s neighbours, the Arab countries. Arabic is written in the same direction as Hebrew, but it’s a joined-up script with letters written in a fluid motion from right to left. Block letters don’t exist in Arabic. Of course Arabs are no less right-handed than we are, in fact in Arab cultures the left hand is subject to a far stricter taboo than in the West. As a young Arab you can forget about trying to write with your left hand. It’s simply not tolerated.

  The Chinese character shui , water. It is composed stroke by stroke from left to right.

  Arabic is a rather unusual form of writing, a script with a hugely important calligraphic tradition that has its origins to a great degree in the Islamic ban on the representation of the human figure, a rule that in earlier times was strictly enforced. Calligraphy was one of the ways of creating visual art and decoration within those limitations, and a wide range of decorative forms of handwriting were developed to that end, in which the priority lay with beauty rather than readability. Of course decorative writing exists in Latin script too, as seen in those curlicue letters we like to use on charters and diplomas, but the practice was taken a good deal further in the Arab world.

  Most forms of everyday Arabic writing stand out from other types of script in their elegant, flowing style, and they are usually written not on the line like Latin script but around the line. Each word dances from just above the line on the right to just below it on the left, like an endless series of waves meeting the coast. The shape of many letters varies significantly depending on the place they occupy between neighbouring letters.

  Arabic script was impossible to produce satisfactorily on a typewriter, since it could not be reduced to a straight line of unchanging letters. Generally speaking this also applied to the typesetting machines used in the printing of works in Arabic. It was a limitation that had all kinds of deleterious effects on the Arab world, which the Enlightenment passed by and which in any case did not lay great emphasis on reading and writing. Not until about 1990 did the computer start to overcome the problem. Modern word processors and computerized typesetting systems can produce perfectly respectable Arabic script.

  Monogram of the Turkish sultan Mehmet II, a masterpiece of calligraphy from 1223 that pays little heed to legibility and is all the more beautiful as a result.

  Would it not be ironic if Arabic, of all languages, had been written for many centuries contrary to the ‘natural writing direction’ – a script so much geared to handwriting that it can be achieved mechanically only by advanced computer programmes? If that were the case, could it ever have spread through large parts of Asia, from Turkey to Indonesia, and across all of North Africa and most of East Africa? Could it have maintained its hold so effortlessly right up to the present day in the entire Arabic-speaking world from Morocco to Iraq, in Iran and in Pakistan, without ever being replaced by a less ‘unnatural’ alternative? It seems highly unlikely.

  The improbability becomes even greater when we consider that our alphabet and Arabic script both emerged in the distant past from the same northern Semitic tribe to which the Greeks belonged. The Greeks, who with their block letters presumably had far less difficulty with their supposedly unnatural direction of writing, began to write from left to right in about 800 BC. Three centuries later that became their sole norm. So why would the choice have been made to write joined-up Arabic in the ‘wrong’ direction?

  In reality Arabic is not awkward to write at all. Its dancing, artistic character arises from an optimal adjustment to the requirements of writing from right to left with the right hand. If we take a close look at the dance-steps that Arabic writing makes, then we see that each word is written on a slight diagonal from top right to bottom left. Each new word starts well above the line. Given that the paper is perpendicular to the body, this also prevents the right hand from brushing across the letters it has just produced and smudging them.

  An example of Ruq’a, an Arabic script in daily use in the Middle East that is excellently suited to right-handed writing. Each word is written from right to left on a falling line.

  The fact that the two most widely used types of script, Arabic and the group that consists of the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, are written opposite ways around is far from the only evidence that there’s no such thing as a natural writing direction. Many different ways of writing have been used in the past. Until the sixth century BC some Greek inscriptions were written boustrophedon style, most commonly those in either Etruscan or Demotic, a script that in Egypt developed from hieroglyphics. Boustrophedon means roughly ‘turning the ox’ in classical Greek and refers to a way of writing in which the lines were written alternately from left to right and from right to left, the way a farmer ploughs a field. Sometimes individual letters were reversed as well, sometimes not.

  Boustrophedon is not at all illogical. Instead of moving the hand and the focus of the eye all the way from one edge of the writing surface to the other every time you start a new line, you read and write from the point where the previous line ended. Since the system never spread much further and soon disappeared from Greek, we can assume that this advantage did not outweigh the disadvantage of dealing with two reading directions at the same time. This probably has to do with the fact that in boustrophedon script the word-images – and in some cases even the letter-images – are not constant. The same word can appear in mirror image depending which line it is on. The word Mirror can suddenly appear as rorriM or even . If we spell out the word letter by letter, this is not much of a problem, but that’s simply not the way we read. Once we’ve learnt to read quickly and fluently we recognize entire words at a glance, which in a boustrophedon text is at least twice as difficult.

  Easter Island script found on a message board. Not only is it written boustrophedon style, each line is upside down in relation to the previous one. The entire piece of wood would have to be turned through 180 degrees at the end of each line.

  A way of writing that attempts to combine the advantages of both boustrophedonic and modern ways of writing has been found on Easter Island – perhaps the unlikeliest place on earth. In 1868 a German missionary called Zumbohm found there a set of kohau rongo rongo, or message boards, pieces of wood inscribed with what is probably an ideogrammatic script (like hieroglyphics). The remarkable thing about them is that they are written in a special kind of boustrophedon script in which each line is turned on its head in relation to the one before. This made it easy to continue writing from the place where you had to stop, while at the same time ensuring that all words were written in the same direction. The disadvantage, of course, was that at the end of each line the whole plank had to be turned around, which cannot have been terribly convenient.

  Unfortunately, when Zumbohm made his discovery there was no longer anyone living who could read the script, so the meaning of what is written on those little planks of wood remains a mystery to this day. What the Easter Islanders did think they knew was where the script came from. According to traditional stories it was brought to them by their first king, Hotu-Matua, who arrived on the island by boat in the twelfth century. Whether or not this is true we cannot be certain, but striking similarities have been found between some of the symbols on the kohau rongo rongo and characters of the Indus script once used in parts of the Indian subcontinent.

  The Chinese do things differently again. They write their characters in columns that run from top to bottom and are placed next to each other to be read from right to left, while each individual chara
cter is formed from left to right. But there have also been scripts that ran vertically downwards with columns arranged left to right, the ancient Mongolian script for example, or that were written as a vertical boustrophedon.

  In truth there is no imaginable direction that has not been used by some linguistic group or other. Although people have been known to change the direction of their handwriting, think up an entirely different system, or adopt the style of their neighbours, until the sixteenth century no clear shift towards a particular direction of writing can be discerned. It seems a majority agreed early on that it’s more convenient to work from top to bottom than from bottom to top, but there’s no trace of a consensus when it comes to the horizontal direction, except that boustrophedon systems never really caught on. One extremely turbulent region in this respect is present-day Turkey, where the script was originally boustrophedon Hittite, after which people switched to writing Lydian, which ran from right to left, a language superseded by Greek, which is written in the opposite direction, before the Ottomans introduced the right–left Arabic script from 1453 onwards in which their Turkish language was written until 1928 when, under Atatürk, it was given a modern Latin alphabet of its own that ran from left to right once more.

  However often and however categorically it is posited, the idea that writing from left to right is more natural seems to be primarily a product of Western imperialism and ethnocentrism: imperialism because many ways of writing have been pushed aside over the past five centuries by the relentless spread of Latin script across regions colonized by European powers; and ethnocentrism because the colonizers consistently saw native cultures as inferior and therefore felt their writing habits were unimportant.

  The distribution of writing directions in the Old World up until about 1500. The arrows give the direction in which the characters are written, either in lines or in columns. A short perpendicular line shows where the next line or column comes, so English is an arrow pointing right with a short stroke pointing downwards. A snaking line indicates boustrophedon. The boxed texts give the names of lost writing systems, or indicate developments in areas where the script changed repeatedly. In the latter case the most recent convention is at the top, the oldest at the bottom.

  An example of cuneiform script. It means roughly: ‘May Ahoramazda preserve this land from the enemy, hunger and treachery.’ The vertical strokes present no problems, but the horizontal and diagonal strokes are almost impossible for a left-hander to produce. Cuneiform is the only exclusively right-handed system of writing.

  Missionaries and evangelists in particular were responsible for propagating the Latin script and eroding local cultures. Today the economic dominance of the Western world ensures that its expansion continues, if rather more slowly. China, Japan and the Arab world do not seem likely to adopt the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic is in glowing good health and the Indonesian scripts and those of Southeast Asia are alive and well, yet Westerners still blithely pass over one inescapable fact: at least half the world’s population writes from right to left.

  Since it’s impossible to point to a consistent preference either way and the vast majority of people everywhere are right-handed, we can safely conclude that there is no such thing as a natural writing direction. It’s not significantly harder to write from right to left with the right hand than the other way around, as the Arabs demonstrate. This also means it cannot be particularly difficult to write from left to right using the left hand. There are just a few practical problems that are perfectly easy to solve, with a bit of care and attention – but more of that later.

  Nevertheless there is one system of writing that can be produced only with the right hand. It is cuneiform script, whose name derives from the Latin for wedge, cuneus, a reference to the shape of the horizontal and vertical strokes that are combined to form the characters. They were drawn in wet clay with a reed stylus that had a triangular profile, so each stroke acquired a small wedge-shaped notch at the start. Cuneiform script was written from left to right, with the notch marking the left end of each horizontal stroke. That is something which is almost impossible to achieve with the left hand.

  22

  The Weight of the Liver

  It starts when we’re about two years old and it never stops. We ask ‘why?’ as soon as we come upon anything that strikes us as unfamiliar or strange. Left-handedness is one example. Virtually since the beginning of recorded time, people have asked themselves why some individuals prefer using the left hand to the right. The more astute among them have immediately realized that there are two questions here. The first and perhaps more intriguing is: why do we have a hand preference at all? Only after answering that question can we ask ourselves why not all of us favour the same hand.

  The first person we know to have developed a theory about the cause of one-handedness was Plato. The debate in part seven of his Laws, between an Athenian and the Cretan Cleinias, shows that he thought we came into the world ambidextrous but started to favour one hand because of the empty-headed way mothers and carers treat children. This caused ‘lameness in one hand’. What precisely it was that had this pernicious influence he doesn’t tell us, unfortunately, which worked to the advantage of later adherents of similar theories, since it meant they could all the more easily hitch the world’s most ancient scientific authority to their wagons.

  Even in Plato’s day the grass was greener on the other side of the fence. However superior the Greek philosopher may have felt to the many barbarian peoples of neighbouring lands, he was convinced that the upbringing of children was occasionally ordered better elsewhere – among the Scythians, for example, a much feared warrior people. Scythians, Plato has his Athenian say enviously, are far cleverer than Athenians. They use ingenious training methods to ensure the capacities of both hands and both arms are retained, proving that those who neglect their left side are acting contrary to nature.

  To Plato one-handedness was merely a regrettable consequence of a careless upbringing. This cannot be the case, since there were never any truly ambidextrous Scythians and the frequency of right-handedness is roughly the same in all peoples. Aside from the minor impact of taboos, there’s hardly any difference between them, whereas we would expect significant variation if hand preference was a product of culture and upbringing.

  Since Plato’s time only one really serious attempt has been made, by American psychoanalyst Abram Blau, to attribute left- and right-handedness entirely to environmental factors. He carried out his study during and shortly after the Second World War, in the days when behaviourism held the humanities in an iron grip. Before his day, all kinds of mechanistic explanations had come and gone over the centuries.

  For as long as the Ancient World lasted, Plato and Aristotle retained their authority. Aristotle had little of interest to say about hand preference. He merely claimed that all movement came ‘by nature’ from the right and that the left hand was therefore unsuited to operating independently. After the collapse of the Roman Empire people had other things to do than to philosophize about hand preference, so it was the late fifteenth century before someone came up with a genuinely fresh insight.

  That someone was Lodovico Richieri, an Italian who lived from 1469 to 1525. He was the first person, although by no means the last, to connect left-handedness with situs inversus, a condition in which the layout of the organs in the human body is reversed. Ricchieri, who was active some hundred years before William Harvey described the circulation of the blood, regarded the heart and liver as sources of heat. The heart served the left side of the body and the liver the right. If the liver was for some reason unable to perform its beneficial work to optimum effect, then a person became left-handed. One reason might be that their liver was on the wrong side, on the left.

  It was not a particularly strong argument, and fortunately there is no connection between hand preference and situs inversus, a disorder with far-reaching consequences. We have been aware of this for centuries, as demonstrated by the work of the curious
seventeenth-century Englishman Sir Thomas Browne, a prominent citizen of Norwich. Browne was a typical child of his time, whose studies at Oxford, Montpellier in France, Padua in Italy and Leiden in the Netherlands turned him into a liberally educated scholar in all kinds of fields. He was actually a physician by profession, but one no less at home in the experimental sciences of his time, not to mention alchemy, astrology and sorcery – a true homo universalis, who on one occasion even acted as an expert witness for the prosecution in a witch trial, which ended with both ladies convicted as charged.

  Although he took seriously a great many things we would now regard as fanciful or based on old wives’ tales, his fame was derived mainly from his crusade against superstition. In 1648 he published a book with the wonderful title Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or enquiries into Very Many Received Tenets and Commonly Presum’d TRUTHS, which examined prove but VULGAR ERRORS. Among the topics he covers in his book are the ideas of his time about left- and right-handedness, and he rightly rejects Ricchieri’s situs inversus theory on the grounds that the phenomenon is far too rare to account for something as common as left-handedness. Situs inversus occurs in only one in 10,000 people and even then it is often incomplete. Sometimes only the organs in the chest cavity are reversed, sometimes only those in the abdomen.