[Wylug-help] Urdu Support

[Aaron Crane]

John Hodrien writes:
> As off topic as this is,

Um, yes.  Sorry about that.

> interesting...  I can't quite imagine learning to write letters in
> both directions,

A brief experiment suggests that mirror writing isn't as hard as might
be thought.  You do have to mind your ps and qs, though.  And your bs
and ds.

It also occurs to me that we're culturally trained from a very young age
to deal with a unidirectional script.  Presumably boustrophedon writing
isn't as bizarre if you don't have that influence.  Also, the Phoenician
and early Greek (and Old Italic) scripts (which are all related, and
which often appear boustrophedon in inscriptions) don't have any letter
pairs which are mirror images of each other, which has to be a help.

If you look at the development of the classical and modern Latin script
from (ultimately) Phoenician, you can observe lots of mirroring and
rotations of individual letters, not just left-right reflections.

Bizarre trick: write on a piece of paper while you're holding it on your
forehead.  (On the side that faces outwards, just in case you were
wondering.)  Apparently most people naturally produce mirror writing
when they do that.

> nor can I imagine the saved CR compensating for the smudge of
> unintelligible goo left being after I rub my hand across my barely
> understandable handwriting.

I think that's less of an issue when you're writing with a hammer, a
chisel, and a large flat stone...

-- 
Aaron Crane