For example, in English the word right (opposite of left) and right (privileges, as in human rights) are homonyms. In Spanish, derecho/a also means both of those things. Don’t the concepts behind those words predate the cross-pollination of the two languages? Why do they share this homonym quality?
That doesn’t sound right (heh). Left to right was probably from writing being left to right. Up for increasing number just seems natural, maybe because we build up from the ground, stack things up from the bottom.
I’m guessing that in texts in right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew, graphs would be drawn the other way around, the X axis increasing leftward.
As an Arabic speaker, our graphs also go from left to right. That said for some reason our number are written from left to right for some reason.
I’ll let you make a post asking.