
English is heavily left-handed - gandalfgeek
http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/31462310493/english-is-heavily-left-handed
======
ZoFreX
> 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.

~~~
majormajor
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.

~~~
sirdavidoff
Perhaps the keys you use more often are _cleaner_ than the others?

~~~
pc86
The center may be whiter but they get that terrible grey circle on them.

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

------
balgarath
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'

~~~
wickeand000
You can always tell a left-handed person when they say they like a pen because
it dries quickly!

------
mikeash
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.

~~~
eCa
It's not QWERTY that's left-handed here, it's QWERTY _used for English_ that
is.

~~~
mikeash
Yes, but QWERTY was designed for English.

~~~
michaelcampbell
Or designed against it. ;-)

------
tosseraccount
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.

~~~
gms7777
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.

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

------
Paul_S
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.

------
Claudus
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

~~~
eru
Did you ever try left-handed dvorak?

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

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

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

------
tobyjsullivan
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).

------
languagehacker
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.

------
smithzvk
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.

------
ilyay
Not if you're a vi user.

------
graywh
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.

~~~
martinced
(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.

------
jdthomas
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.

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

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

------
binaryorganic
Sweaterdresses.

