grump

[gfish]

Who else gets slightly annoyed when people don't use the correct map-relative direction (up->north, down->south, over->east/west) when talking about large-scale geography? From Seattle I can head up to Vancouver, down to Portland, or over to Spokane. Period.

Comments

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Couldn't this also be related to directionality of written language, since Chinese is written right to left?

[caladri.livejournal.com]

I'm not hypothesizing — that's the way that orientation is in Mongolian. Hand directions are variants (right hand is the west hand) of cardinal directions given as though one is facing out from the entrance of a ger.

Moreover, direction of writing shouldn't interfere with left and right in a non-writing context. It's not like there is some innate sense of left and right that right-to-left writing systems recognize as being backwards. So that would only matter if written documents were perceived as having their top facing north and their face facing up, which seems unlikely.

But mostly it couldn't be related since Mongolians aren't Chinese and the Mongolian language doesn't use the Han Chinese writing system, even in the Mongolian regions within China. Well, I can't say for all Mongol ethnic groups. Certainly there are some places which retain very old dialects from when Mongolian had a major influence on the language of the Han Chinese, and those people are likely to use the Han Chinese script, but I don't know what type of orientation their languages use.

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Got it, thanks. I had forgotten was a ger was, despite having a friend who has made several yurts.