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Largely unrelated, my son (19) described something as being W from him, as in the cardinal 4 directions W,A,S and D.
Did you question your parenting at that point?
A 19 year old is capable of a joke, you know.
No more so than normal!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language?wprov=sfla1
Sorta related, these people only use the cardinal directions, north, east, south, west. No left or right
Still four directions, but it's interesting that they use an absolute point of reference as opposed to the more common relative ones.
Yea, this just happened pop into my head. I found it really interesting and thought you might too
Huh, how do you say something is on the "left side" of an object then? Like "the left side of my ribs hurt"
Depending on your facing, presumably "the East side of my ribs hurt".
Pretty much this, if I remember correctly. Because of this linguistic feature, they have an exceptionally well-developed sense of absolute direction and basically know at all times which way is which.
Bob fell out of the boat. Which side? The south side. Turn the boat 90° clockwise. He’s still off the south side of the boat.
I don't know that culture, but in general those are questions they learn not to say. Perhaps they point to a place "there" and that is enough.
When translating from a gendered language to English (which doesn't grammatically require a gender for everything) I often has to guess was gender important or not - sometimes this is not obvious.
I cannot find it anymore, but remember recently reading a blog post about a language where their concept of directions was "toward the river", "away from the river (or: into the jungle)", "down the river", "up the river", and they expressed only those directions. So when a western researcher asked them how they called "left" and "right", they gave different answers every time, or something like that…
There was a Lateral with Tom Scott episode about a small island that didn't use north, south, east, or west. Instead it was towards the ocean, inland, clockwise, and counter-clockwise
I know there is at least one with no concept of right or left, front or back, only the fixed directions of the world like north and south.
Rimwards, hubwards, spinwards, widershins.
That's Guugu Yimithirr, spoken by the Aboriginal Australian nation of the same name.
Yes thank you.
My mind works more like this - North is always north, I can't give directions using right and left and have broken every dance teacher I had, all ended up saying "toward the mirror, toward the window, toward the door, etc because I can't find right or left fast enough to dance, it moves every time I turn around, I want directions to be fixed.
Yes, I’ve heard of many. Can’t think of the names at 4am unfortunately.
My favourite was one that was basically in and out, as the centre of their island had a mountain so things were either towards or away from it.
Perhaps it's Manam? Their island has a volcano, but they use a land-sea axis for directions:
Manam, like most Oceanic languages, primarily uses an absolute reference directional system, even on a local scale, (as opposed to many European languages which primarily use relative reference systems). This system is oriented on a land-sea axis. However, Manam's system is unique because it has taken on a circular nature, becoming intrinsically linked to the geography of the island which is almost perfectly circular. Below are the directional terms associated in Manam:
llau 'toward the sea'
Auta 'toward the land'
Ata 'to one's right when one is facing the sea'
Awa 'to one's left when one is facing the sea'
The Wikipedia article doesn't specifically phrase it as "towards/away from the volcano" , but Reddit posts linking to the Wikipedia article phrase it like that.
I heard of this before, too, and they also used clockwise and counterclockwise then. So, in effect just a polar coordinate system.
But yeah, also having a hard time finding out which concrete island that was...
English and Spanish also feature "above" and "below", sooooo
ana and kata for four-dimensional spaces too.
From the Greek for above and below, and also not in the general use. But I really appreciate seeing them in this discussion.
The number of dimensions in space is three, and that has nothing at all to do with language. When you eliminate one of the dimensions ("up" in your example), you are left with two, and you're describing dimensions in a plane.
The reason all languages use four words for the two dimensions is because there are two directions per dimension.
ETA: why there are three (plus one for time), and how do we know that, are very interesting questions (to me).
Disclaimer: I don't know, and I have no particular k owledge in this field, I'm only reasoning here..
I think those four directions are natural to use regardless of culture, based on our senses and bodies. There are things you can see, and things you can't, namely in front of you and behind you. And your references to the sides would naturally be your hands, where most people can distinguish right as dominant. These would serve as simple reference points in terms of directions, so the question is, if your bodies were different, for example asymetric, would our directions also be?
Imagine of we had four ears, two forward and two back, could that result in eight basic directions? What would it take for us to have three?
What does basic mean here? I feel everything hinges on that. Radians claim π/2, π/3, π/4, π/6 are all basic, so they have 16 basic directions. A compass has one, maybe 2 basic directions. When discussing locations it's very common to say northeast, southwest etc, so I'd say there are 8 basics in those terms.
Humans have bilateral symmetry and forward-facing eyes so we naturally have four basic directions.
Up and down is not basic directions?
Birds have the same characteristics
Also the Sun moves in one direction across the sky, along with everything else on the Ecliptic. So that defines one axis, with the perpendicular being another.
Radians are not at all intuitive.
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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