Re: First report on Conm

En réponse à John Cowan <jcowan@...>:

>
> Well, the distinction is partly semantical.  I myself have never met a
> fully
> obligate sinistral.
You have, if only electronically. I am completely fully obligate sinistral.
When I said earlier that I took my fork in my left hand and my knife in my
right one, I forgot to add a few things:
- when I only have a knife, I always use it with my left hand. I cannot use it
with my right one.
- I use spoons only with my left hand. Ask me to use my right hand for this
only if you're ready to clean everything ;)) .
- Even when I use fork and knife, my way of using them is completely different
from what right-handed people do. Mainly, I hardly use the knife at all (and
quite clumsily actually), and do most of the work with the fork, which explains
why I use the most agile hand for it. To me, I'm not eating like a right-handed
person, and people have often remarked that.
So my use of cutlery gives only a superficial impression that I'm not fully
left-handed. I actually am.

  My daughter is as sinistral as they get, and
> would
> automatically eat left-handed if we didn't require her to do
> otherwise,
> but the fact is, we can alter her behavior in this way.  I no more
> could
> learn to eat left-handed than I could learn to walk on my hands.
Bad example. I, clumsy as I am, learned to walk on my hands (I lost the ability
since but I used to be able to do it). Anybody can do it when really wanting
(and with enough time and training). There's nothing preventing someone to do
it, except maybe when you lack an arm or suffer from a muscle disease. Same
with lateralisation.

> The distinction is not about preference, but about capability.
>
Not at all. You forget one thing: we live in a right-handed world, where
everything is organised by right-handed people for right-handed people. Imagine
you had lived all your life in a world where everything was left-handed-only,
you would have automatically developped some adaptability to the situation. The
fact that you didn't is not due to the fact that you *cannot*, but simply that
you *didn't need to*. If the need suddenly came for you to learn to write with
your left hand (if you lost your right one for instance), believe me you would
eventually manage to do it. My father for instance broke his right arm when he
was 6. He was thus obliged by necessity to learn to write with his left hand.
After he got better he began writing again with his right hand, but the fact is
that he *easily* learned to write with his left hand, about as easily as with
his right hand. Yet he is as fully dextral as one can get for everything.

The problem here is that your data is distorted because you don't take our
environment into account. Left-handed people *have* to adapt, so they become
adaptable. In the opposite situation, right-handed people would be the
adaptable ones without a doubt. They seem to adapt very well to writing right-
to-left, although it's quite clumsy for right-handed people, so why not for the
rest?

>
> I doubt it.  Apes don't seem to be lateralized, but Neanderthals were --
> the
> pattern of teeth wear shows that they held hides in their right hands
> to
> strip the flesh off them with their jaws.  Of 20 individuals measured,
> 18 showed right-handed wear.
>
But we're not descendants of the Neanderthals, and anyway we have evolved. Here
again, you won't know because our human environment has a very strong effect on
lateralisation (you probably don't see it that much, but I get troubles
everyday because of that).

>
> By no means.  If it makes you feel better, think of it as a distinction
> between
> "flexible, more or less" and "utterly inflexible".  I think
> non-dextral
> people have trouble grasping just how lateralized dextrals actually
> are.
>
Oh, believe me I understand. But I strongly believe that it's only due to your
lack of *need* to be flexible in our environment. You are actually as flexible
as any "non-dextral". You're just losing that flexibility because you don't
have to use it.

>
> Don't move to New York City, my friend.
>
I won't, be sure of it! :))

>
> That too is a continuum.  :-)
That's why I said "usually" ;)) .

  But to come to the point, there is
> nothing about manual-genital contact that is a strictly male behavior:
> on the contrary.
>
I was specifically referring to the act of peeing while standing up (here, you
made me actually say it! ;) ), something that I haven't seen many women
do ;))) . But what you tell me is probably a good test too ;)) , and has no
gender barriers in this case ;)) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.

Replies