Dangers of Right to Left

I've had a busy time at work lately so I have been doing some reactional surfing on the net and not so much hard work taking screenshots of this and that. I also got to feeling a little lonely for some female company. :-) It had to happen!

I found a great blog with the most lovely Hebrew vowels. I haven't spent time trying to display these yet but I've seen it done a few places.

At The Lesser of Two Weevils I read this post and thought that maybe it was a good thing that I hop around from one writing system to another after all.

Talmida writes:

Turns out there IS a downside to studying God's language. You could flunk an eye exam.

Without any conscious thought whatsoever, I read the eyecharts from right to left today. The optometrist was quite concerned (what on earth is she seeing?) until we figured out what I was doing.

It's odd -- if there are legible words, my brain apparently says "read", and I start at the left. But since it was just random letters, I'm guessing that my brain concluded "decipher!" and started at the right as I do in Hebrew. Even when I was made aware of what I was doing, I had to force myself to read from the left. My eye wanted to begin at the right to turn the letters in to words.

What an interesting phenomenon.

I've also added Fontblog and Blogamundo to my sidebar. I've been reading these blogs on and off for a month or two and just haven't edited the sidebar. There is some great stuff there.