Just south of the east side

I’ll save you the Googling time and tell you the language Guugu Yimithirr comes from an aboriginal people in Australia. It’s one remote region where “egocentric” words such as left and right are not used. Janet discovered this is a NYT magazine article about language:

Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.”

It goes on to describe a situation that a researcher found in Bali back in the 1930s: For us, it might seem the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say, “Now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward.”

This section starts on page 2 of this piece.