左 and 右

[Eleonor]

Hello , I'm interested in chinese characters, especially 左 and 右 (left and right side). I want to know the history of development of these two characters. Can you help me with some materials? 谢谢

[NinjaTurtle]

Both characters consist of two parts. The part in the upper left side of each character is a person's hand.

 

For the character for "left", the hand is holding a ruler in the left hand while using a pencil to draw a straight line, or perhaps to mark measuring marks with a pencil. (The I-beam-looking part of the character is a ruler.)

 

For the character for "right", the hand is putting food into the person's mouth. The idea here is that people usually put food into their mouths with their right hand. (The square box part of the character is a person's mouth.)

 

[OneEye]

No pencil, no mouth, no food, no drawing a straight line. I'm not sure where that explanation came from, but it's simply not accurate.

 

I'm going to oversimplify a bit here, but this is essentially what happened.

 

There were originally two characters:  and 

The one on the left is zuǒ (left hand), while the one on the right is yòu (right hand; now written 又). They look exactly alike, except for the direction they face.

 

Over time, they started to resemble each other:  (that's zuǒ, but you wouldn't know to look at it). So you have ? zuǒ and ? yòu. They look identical, but one is "left" and the other is "right."

 

So how do you know which one you're looking at? You add a mark to distinguish them. Now you have ? zuǒ and 右 yòu. Note that in 右, 口 isn't "a mouth," but a distinguishing mark.

 

But since ? can be "left" or "right," it's still a bit ambiguous. So it's really best to have a character used exclusively for "left," don't you think?

 

Enter 左. It already existed, as a depiction of a "left" hand holding a tool (not a ruler, but a shovel-like tool of some sort), and it meant "to assist." They borrowed it to mean "left," and that's how we got to where we are today. All of this happened pretty early in the history of the writing system. 

 

Interesting tidbit: in Japanese and in traditional (not 繁體 but 傳統) stroke order rules, the ? in 左 and the ? in 右 are written with different stroke orders. That's due to the fact that they were originally different hands.

[Tomsima]

5 hours ago, OneEye said:

in Japanese and in traditional (not 繁體 but 傳統) stroke order rules, the ? in 左 and the ? in 右 are written with different stroke orders. 

This is also still true of 草書 in China - 左 usually starts with a 橫, whereas 右 begins with 撇