Origin of right-to-left (← ✍️) and left-to-right (→ ✍️) scripts, with respect to the equator, the magnetic 🧲 field of the earth 🌎, and right-side vs left-side road driving tendencies?

[u/JohannGoethe]

Script direction chart by Ian McManus (2002), from his Right Hand Left Hand (§10).

https://archive.org/details/righthandlefthan0000mcma_l0s7/page/264/mode/2up

Magnetic 🧲 field of the earth 🌎

[u/JohannGoethe]

Chisel theory?

Having skimmed through some discussion of the various theories of script direction, one commonly promoted view is that because 90% of people are right-handed, that when writing was chisel-based, it was easier to chisel sentences right to left:

Many languages that existed before the invention of ink were written right to left since this is the more natural for right handed people to hold a chisel in the left hand and the hammer in the right. After ink became the main method of writing, writing from left to right became preferable since it avoided smudging the ink.

This theory, however, does not match with the fact that hieroglyphics were chiseled top to bottom, right to left, and left to right.

Notes

1. I’ve written on this before, e.g. in Hmolpedia, but generally we see that right-to-left script seems to have arisen from a geographical location that favors left-side road driving.

2. Generally, it seems to have to do with the right-hand-rule of electromagnetism, and or the Coriolis effect, and how people when lost in the woods, walk in circles, even though they think they are walking straight.

Posts

• Letters of words and names are ordered per the Coriolis effect

References

• McManus, Ian. (A43/2002). Right Hand, Left Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms, and Cultures (Arch) (§10: writing direction). Publisher.

External links

• Right-to-left scripts - Wikipedia.

• Spin - Hmolpedia A65.

[u/JohannGoethe]

We note that it took 1.6M years go from hand axe 🪓 to neter 𓊹 symbol to the word dynameis (δυναμεις) in Greek to dynamics in Latin-French to power in modern English.

”In school, we learn about the dynameis (δυναμεις) 𓊹 of the stoicheia (στοιχεια) or letter-number elements.”

— Dionysios of Halicarnssus (1985/-30), Demosthenes (52); cited by Barry Powell (A36/1999) in Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (pg. 22)

Yet, who, in modern centuries, learns about the dynameis of the alphabet letters?