English is heavily left-handed | Hacker News Reader

English is heavily left-handed

blog.vivekhaldar.com

35 pointsgandalfgeek38 comments

> it turns out that characters on the left occur 58.73% of the time, and those on the right 41.3% of the time. This is certainly not helped by the fact that the right side has 11 letters to the left’s 15

Actually, if you ignore the letter frequencies entirely, this is only 1% off what you would expect based on the 11/15 split. As others have pointed out, the difference here is made up by punctuation. It would be interesting to measure frequency of key usage including punctuation and see which side (if any) comes out on top.

One thing I have noticed is that most control commands (copy, paste, close window, switch window, &c) are left dominant, which makes sense if you have the mouse in your right hand.

Based on a thoroughly scientific glance at the white keycaps on the Apple keyboard I use at my desk at work—which get amazingly dirty amazingly quickly—the most used key's when I'm working are largely punctuation: some set of 9, 0, [, ], backspace, \, enter, shift, and /. Surprisingly, my left shift key is cleaner than my capslock key at the moment, which I didn't expect at all given how much I hit shift-9 and shift-0 in particular.

But this is probably horribly biased because when I get a snack I eat it with my right hand, which I assume makes keys on that side get dirtier quicker.

Perhaps the keys you use more often are cleaner than the others?

The center may be whiter but they get that terrible grey circle on them.

I don't know what you guys do to your keyboards but I don't want to ever touch them...

For the curious, WhatPulse is an app you can download that will keep track of your keystrokes (I'm sure there are others that do the same)

Lefty here. Bad title - writing English kinda sucks for lefties - on blackboards/whiteboards I always smudge the letters as a write left to right. Same thing with some pens. And you can't see the letters your just wrote as you move left-to right. Not to mention the English language was around a long time before QWERTY. Truth is, English was heavily left-handed,we'd all be writing right-to-left. More appropriate title would be 'QWERTY is heavily left-handed'

You can always tell a left-handed person when they say they like a pen because it dries quickly!

Yup, you hit all the bullets. Many a day in high school, I'd come home with the side of my left hand colored silver from fresh graphite.

It's not English that's left-handed here, it's QWERTY. The article acts like it's discussing English, when it's really mostly about a particular keyboard layout.

It's not QWERTY that's left-handed here, it's QWERTY used for English that is.

Yes, but QWERTY was designed for English.

Or designed against it. ;-)

But of course he woundn't get so many page hits with the less sensational "Qwerty is heavily left-handed."

It's because of tactics like this the web is going downhill as a medium of fair discourse.

Which makes sense. The right hand was used for the carriage return on manual typewriter. Modern times, of course, most users of often have left hand poised on keyboard and right hand flipping between keyboard and mouse.

In addition, I don't know if its accurate, but I have heard in the past that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow down typists who were typing faster than the manual typewriters could handle at the time. It would make sense that the key layout would be less than ideal for the typical right hander.

No, the layout was supposed to be optimized to prevent jams while typing.

Quite the opposite. All the punctuation is on the right side. I've got a split keyboard and not counting meta keys I count 28 on the left and 32 on the right side.

It's a good thing that QWERTY keyboards are left-handed, it saves me a lot of stress when I don't have to take my right hand off the mouse to execute commands, or type random text in games with my left hand:

  gg
  wtf
  asdffasdfasdf
  re
  b
  d
  etc

Did you ever try left-handed dvorak?

It all falls apart when you have to say "p mid" or use Om(N)islash, though.

It's actually convenient, as ctrl-v/c/x and others are usually used in combination with the mouse.

That's why they were chosen as ctrl-v/c/x

...I figured they just kept them next to the [c]opy command.

This would be far more accurately titled "Keyboards are heavily left-handed". Any analysis of the language itself would clearly indicate it favours the right hand (from being written left to right to the actual shape of the letters and their flow).

That's interesting, because as a kid/teenager, I spent a lot of time either typing or playing guitar, and I feel like both of them played a significant part in strengthening my left-hand fine motor coordination, despite being a righty.

I argued the other day that for programmers using qwerty, the left shift gets way too much action as all of the programming stuff is on the right hand, stupidly, the most common stuff tends to be an the shift level.

Not if you're a vi user.

About the split keyboard he mentions: Am I the only person that hits 6 with the right index finger? A coworker has a similarly split keyboard and I can never type 6 on it.

(long rant but since you're asking ; )

No you're not the only one: I do the same since so many decades that I won't change anymore ; )

The '6' issue on split keyboard is a gigantic SNAFU. Contrarily to popular belief there's not "one true way" to touch-type the '6'. There are different "schools of touch-typing" and it has been so since the beginning of typewriters. And the world's fatest typer on staggered QWERTY keyboard is semi-breaking all the touch-typing rules anyway....

So pick your poison: either touch-type '6' with your right or left hand, nobody is 'right' for doing one or the other (no matter the amount of arguing). Staggered QWERTY keyboard make zero sense from an ergonomic point of view so who cares anyway ; )

Split-staggered keyboard like the Goldtouch aren't ergonomic: they're split, but non ergo (there are real split ergo keyboards out). Any keyboard which is not mostly symmetric cannot possibly be ergonomic.

Most split-but-non-ergo keyboards (IBM Model M15 --very goot but very expensive, Cherry MX 5000 -- very good but very expensive too) put the 6 on the left side. Some do put the '6' on the right side: like some Belkin split keyboard (sadly these Belkin keyboards are using a shitty keyswitch).

I've even seen some split keyboards solving the issue by putting two '6' keys on the keyboard: one on the left side, one on the right side (cannot find the name right now but I'm 100% positive they do exist). Sadly as far as I know there's not any split keyboard using a good keyswitch (say buckling spring switches or Cherry MX switches or Topre switches or ALPS switches) that offers the '6' on both side of the keyboard.

It would be more interesting to check ngrames to see how frequently you must hit a key on the same hand twice. Qwerty was designed to prevent jamming typewriters, IIRC.

Yes, but cutting paper is a right-handed person's job.

That's just not right. It's a sinister plot.

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The important thing is not the absolute difference 58.7% - 41.3% = 17.4%, but the relative difference 58.7%/41.3% ≈ 142%. That is, those statistics indicate that left-handed letters occur about 42% more often than right-handed ones.

(While I'm nitpicking math, though, there's something funny about whatever rounding choices made the numbers 58.73% and 41.3%.)

Sweaterdresses.

Deleted comment

QWERTY was designed to avoid jams by keeping letters in common digraphs separated from each other, not to slow down typists.

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