I was watching this guy read a Japanese newspaper on a train and it made me curious. You see, I am left handed, and when I was a little kid I used to construct little books. I'd make them read from right to left because that seemed the most natural way to me. It took my Mom quite a bit of undoing to get me to understand that books read from left to right. I would have felt right at home in Japan. I know that left-handed people are less predictable in terms of their neurology, and I wondered if left handed-ness and Japaneseness have anything conceivably in common from a brain structure perspective.
I guess the essential question is why the Japanese write from right to left. If most of its population is right-handed, this just doesn't seem practical. Is it just pure happenstance? Did it emerge due to specific cultural circumstances? Did they change the presentation of the language on the page to better suit its structure, or did its structure emerge from the presentation? Is there any evidence that Japanese neurology has to do with how they read and write? Is the English way at all ''standard'' with slight deviations from select countries, or is written language orientation pretty much all across the board? Is it sheer coincidence that my left-handedness happened to manifest in a way that coincides with the Japanese way of doing things?
Just curious.