Well yea, about the brush part, but sometimes people write vertically with a pen or something nowadays. (Okay, I'll admit I've never seen it happen with Chinese, but I have seen Japanese do this.)

But Chinese is definitely the worst script for lefthanders. All the strokes are designed for the right hand and are much more uncomfortable with the left hand. Unless you were to change the strokes, but you can only go so far until it becomes unreadable, and it would be difficult to get a good system going.

Well, technically R-L was made by right-handed folks. They held the chisel in their left hand, and the hammer in their right hand.

I'm left handed and I often find myself smudging the ink on the paper - and I've never tried to make a right to left script, maybe I should.

Is that how those RTL scripts developed? If so then I'd buy the fact that some RTL scripts are designed for the left hand. (Designed for righthanders maybe, but the script itself is designed to be written with the left hand - and now since we don't use hammers anymore, it would become a very lefthand friendly script.)

What RTL scripts were designed like this with the chisel and hammer approach? Or were most/all of them? (But I guess not Arabic? At least not the Arabic we know today, the cursive one.)

@Twix93: It could be fun to do so, but you should also find a way to write normal English without smudging the paper. Do you turn the paper?

No, I just let it smudge But I usually use a pen that doesn't smudge very well anyway.

Look up "pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions" - there aren't many, and most are very different to the Arabic abjad we know today. The Arabic script was really developed for pen and brush.

This is a little hard to explain but this is how my left handed friend does it. Instead of holding your hand to the side of the pen, hold it so that your hand rests at the bottom. If you do it right this should stop the smearing. With today's technology, though, I don't see why people can't just write in whatever direction they want. Computers will still go right to left and when was the last time you read a written note?

So how do right-handed Arabs write?

With their right hands. I've never thought about it myself. It feels perfectly natural.

I think what I do is raise my hand above the page and write sort of vertically.

That's interesting, because I always thought that left-to-right scripts being hard for lefthanders was nonsense. The way I write (and I'm right-handed), I can write left to write or right to left. Lefthanders may have problems, but I think that's because they were never taught how to write, they had to figure it out themselves.