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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't find any information on this. The historical answer may be something simple and silly, but I'd like to think it's to do with the fact that our brain is not initially wired to distinguish straight images from mirrored ones. We acquire this ability at some stage as we learn to write (children may at some point confuse the letters and draw them mirrored).

So maybe back when literacy was so low and scripts were used only occasionally, to most literate people it didn't matter which way you drew each letter, until someone decided to canonicalize it. I suppose the choice was arbitrary.

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If you use pen and ink, then the current left to right writing of the latin alphabet is very convenient for right handed people.

It doesn't explain though how ꓭ became B.

I can imagine a person writing a B using their right hand moving left to right. To me (maybe in hindsight and biased) it seems more natural to write B that way. But there may be cultures who write B but write right to left or both ways boustrophedonically "as the ox plows" like ancient Greeks did.

My reasoning is once the vertical line part is drawn it would be awkward to go backward for the two bumps. Especially if using ink not chilling it into stone. You would end up smearing the ink.

But even with stone or ink you'd have more room on the right for spacing between the previous and next letter.

It seems very subjective. There are letters where you start with the curve and end with the straight line, like lower case d. So for the mirrored B there's nothing wrong with starting with Ɛ and adding the straight line afterwards.

So still, the final choice seems pretty arbitrary to me.

We are used to things the way they are today and the way they are taught in school. Before the "standartization" of the alphabet, it did not matter whether letters were rotated or reflected; for example, originally the letter A was written upside down (with the bull's horns pointing upwards). Even the ordering of letters in the alphabet was not seen as essential; it was introduced first as a handicap for easy learning, and then, in some languages such as Greek letters started being used as numbers.

This is untrue. I use a fountain pen in my right hand for both English (LTR) and Hebrew (RTL) writing. Even with slow-drying ink, smudging or dirtying my hand is not an issue in either language. My two oldest daughters also use a fountain pen (one left handed, one right handed) with no issue.

I'm left-handed and grew up writing English. Except in the cases that I take special care to hold my hand somewhat awkwardly off the page, virtually everything I've ever written has some amount of smudging. I have vivid memories of my graphite-coated hand in primary school. In addition, it's harder to see the flow of the word; your hand covers up everything but the last letter or two.

It's clearly something that impacts different people in different ways.

Interesting, thank you for the counterpoint.

My sister instead of her hand turns the page nearly 90° counter clockwise. She writes "upwards". I always thought that was pretty neat.

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