VMs: Re: Re: humanist [was; Some thoughts etc]

["Barbara Barrett" <barbarabarrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Omar Occluded;
> hI bARBARA,
>
> May I ask you if you found it easier writing following left-to-right
> direction ? Have you tried writing from right to left?

Barbara Blathers;
Do you mean the direction of the script or the hand used to write it?

As for the direction of the script it is definitely left-to-right - the line
up on the left hand side combined with the "ragged right" line-ends, and
paragraph ends in particular, shows that the script was started on the left
hand side of the page and finished on the right. Particularly in paragraph
final lines this is a feature that'd impossible to imitate if writing right
to left - the final line would seldom if ever be able to line up with the
leftmost first letter column - but it always does.

Also on the high quality repo one sees faint words (where the ink was
running out) followed by dense words (after the ink had been replenished).
If the writing was right-to-left then the pattern would be dense-faint, but
the pattern is faint-dense which shows the next word written after the pen
was replenished was to the right, and thus confirms the direction of writing
and of the script.

I determined the direction of writing *before* I attempted to imitate it, so
no, I've never tried writing from right-to-left, there's no point in it.

As for the handedness of the author, that's not a question I've addressed
until recently. I tried writing with both left and right hands, I found
left-hand difficult but not impossible and a left handed person would be
better at it than I who am right handed. I used my right hand originally out
of convenience only.

However, thanks to Nick's question on handedness (which I was originally
uncertain about) I've found clue after clue which suggest a right handed
person was the scribe, and now I'm reasonably certain that the scribe was
right handed. Certainly the character set would have had quite a different
appearance had a left handed person devised it ;-)

Thanks to Nick I will be collecting all the evidence for a right handed
scribe together and make a section of the planned website dedicated to these
arguments.

Barbara




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