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Comment by glandium | Hacker News Reader

So interestingly, for 左 and 右, the etymological stroke order is the japanese one. It was "simplified" in mainland China and Taiwan.

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Do you have a source for your claim? Particularly, you're suggesting that the stroke order for the top left part was once different in China. I'd really like to see a document on this.

I can buy that, as I know the top left portion in chinese historically is for the left hand. If the historical variation of right was for the right hand, that would make a lot of sense.

Are you really suggesting that writers changed hands during writing a single character? That sounds totally impractical. Also, that does not explain why there should be a different stroke order.

No, 左 is "left" and 右 is "right", they're saying that the 𠂇 radical itself means "left hand", and they later added a similar one for "right hand".

Looking it up (on wiktionary, at least) it seems like originally 又 was "right hand", however if you look at really old versions of that character it looks mostly like a mirror of 𠂇.

Interestingly, Wiktionary lists both left and right as phonosemantic compounds where the phonetic part is "left hand" or "right hand" and the semantic part is "assist" and "mouth" (I think in this case the "mouth" is used to bolster the "pronounced like" of the phonosemantic compound, since it's used on the right side not the left). This seems to be because the word for "left hand" became the word for "left" and same for "right hand", so they're pronounced the same; and the semantic component was added later to bolster/specialize the glyph.

Anyway, it seems like the 𠂇 radical in 右 is etymologically a variant of 又 which is a mirror of 𠂇 (well, a mirror of a three-pronged historical form of that) except it was rotated around the glyph so that it looks exactly like 𠂇 but the stroke order is reversed.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Here's how I made my opinion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_order#Stroke_order_per_... separates traditional stroke order, Taiwan, Japanese, mainland China and Hong Kong, and specifically talks about 𠂇, saying that the traditional stroke order differentiates its stroke order according to etymology and character structure.

Which in and of itself, is not sufficient, but is a strong clue.

Then, if you look up the seal script origins of 左 and 右, you find that the top-left part of the character comes from different directions: It comes from the left for 左 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/%E...) and from the right for 右 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/%E...). One way to look at it is that the descending stroke of 𠂇 in 左 is the arm, while it's the horizontal stroke in 右.

But at this point, that's mostly conjecture.

So the next step is to simply find how the characters were actually written by writers from far in the past. And it turns out there are such resources:

左: http://shufa.guoxuedashi.com/5DE6/

右: http://shufa.guoxuedashi.com/53F3/

This contains the characters as written from a lot of different material from different periods. And in those many instances of the characters, the way the two first strokes can be connected is a strong indicator of how they were written.

For instance, on 左, they connect on the top-right end, indicating the horizontal stroke comes first: http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/6t1/29792.jpg http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/6t1/29793.jpg http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/ks/R201308025_TM.TXT.0248.0... http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/sf26/r201509387.0252.9ea9de...

And on 右, they connect on the lower-left end, indicating the horizontal stroke is last: http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/xs/r201308029.0111.18[26288... http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/xsd1/r201308030.0150.23[3dd... http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/xs/r201308029.0111.16[24a6b... http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/xsd1/r201308030.0150.23[3dd...

You can't do such connections by writing the horizontal stroke first.

There are also examples of the horizontal stroke connecting to the 口 part, further indicating it's the second stroke: http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/xsd1/r201308030.0150.5[6f86... http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/xs/r201308029.0111.2[0a33aa... http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/xs/r201308029.0111.4[0a2633...

If you look at the pages linked above, you'll also find the names of those writers, which you can look up and check out some of them were living > 1000 years ago.

Funnily, there's this interesting exception of 左 with the horizontal stroke second: http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/sf26/r201509387.0252.9eb7a9...

Wow, thanks for the resources! You make a convincing argument. I studied sinology, but did not go that deep into character etymology. So basically, what those writers did when they wanted to write properly, was to have the older script variants in their heads, even though the actual forms they were writing may look the same. Or rather, look the same in print and in later standards. Huh.

In Chinese calligraphy one is instructed to emulate the shapes of model master calligraphers, and typically there is only one stroke order that can consistently achieve the look and style of the model characters.

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