Re: Ambi(?)dextrosity

On Thursday, September 25, 2003, at 07:42 , Andreas Johansson wrote:

[snip]

> But I wonder if "ambidextrous" is really the word for this - isn't it
> supposed
> to refer to people who can use either hand for anything, rather than for
> people
> who use one hand for some stuff and the other for other?
Yes, it does.  Long years ago when I was at grammar school, many of the
classroom had very long blackboard fixed to the walls.  One of our
teachers was
ambidextrous; he would position himself in the middle and start writing
with the
chalk in his left hand till the writing got to th middle, then the chalk
changed hands
and his right hand finished the line!  There was no discernible difference
between
the writing of his two hands.

But I suspect the situation where some people can use one hand better for
certain
tasks and the other better for other tasks is not very rare.  Is there an
adjective to
describe such a person.  If there ain't, there ought to be.

> Now, I should be figuring out how to say "right" and "left" in my various
> conlangs - only Yargish appears to be having something, and that's the
> postpositions _-aj_ "to the right of" and _-ich_ "to the left of"!
Unfortunately BrSc (in its various forms) has developed practically no
vocabulary.  Dutton's Speedwords, which started the whole thing off,
follows
the auxlang tradition:
'dek' = right [hand] ~ 'deko' (right+OPPOSITE) = left [hand]

I shall almost certainly follow natlang tradition and have two separate
words
(just as Andreas has two separate morphemes).

Ray
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