<div dir="ltr">Dear Ian (and all),<div><br></div><div>A highly relevant paper on this topic (though not specifically on Northeast Asia) is:</div><div><br></div><div><b>Brown, Cecil H. (1983). 'Where do cardinal direction terms come from?'. <i>Anthropological Linguistics. </i>Vol. 25 (2). Pp. 121-161.</b></div><div><b><br></b></div><div>It appears that where cardinal direction terms are related to terms for 'front', 'behind', 'left' or 'right' at all, the most common situation involves an eastward orientation, i.e. 'east' corresponds with 'front', or 'west' with 'behind', or 'north' with 'left', or 'south' with 'right', or more than one of these correspondences. This is the kind of system described by various others in the thread, and appears to relate to the salience and cultural significance of the rising sun. However, other canonical postures are possible, including the one you describe for Mainland Northeast Asia, but also others (e.g. Hawaiian apparently has a right/north and left/south association). It would be interesting to know whether the relationship between 'back' and 'north' is mainly restricted to languages spoken in the far north of the globe.</div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div>Jonathon</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, 26 Dec 2020 at 11:55, Siva Kalyan <<a href="mailto:sivakalyan.princeton@gmail.com">sivakalyan.princeton@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div style="overflow-wrap: break-word;">Sanskrit likewise has <i>dakṣiṇa</i><span style="font-style:normal"> (> "Deccan [plateau]"), which means both "right" and "south". And I just learned that </span><i>teṉ</i><span style="font-style:normal"> in Tamil has the same polysemy. The terms for "north" do not mean "left" in either of these languages, though.</span><div><br></div><div>Siva<br><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>On 25 Dec 2020, at 9:18 pm, David Gil <<a href="mailto:gil@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank">gil@shh.mpg.de</a>> wrote:</div><br><div><p>Dear Ian (and all),</p><p>In the Middle East, forward/backwards maps on to the cardinal points at a 90º rotation to what you describe for NE Asia. In (poetic) Hebrew, E is 'forward', while in Arabic, N is 'left', while 'Yemen' is, etymologically, 'right' — in all three cases, you're facing east.</p><p>One might speculate that both systems are sun-oriented, the Middle-Eastern system towards the highly-valued rising sun, and the NE Asian system towards the location of the sun at midday.</p><p>David</p><p><br></p><div><br></div><div>On 25/12/2020 08:29, JOO, Ian [Student] wrote:<br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div name="messageBodySection"><div dir="auto">Dear typologists,<br><br>I am currently working on a doctoral project focusing on the areality of Mainland Northeast Asia (Korea, Mongolia, Northeast China, but <strong>not</strong> Japan, Russian Far East, or Sout<span>hern/Western China).</span><br>One of the interesting possible areal features of MNEA languages (Tuvan, Manchu, Korean, Mandarin, and Mongolian) that I’ve found is that these five languages, except Mandarin, can express “North” with the word meaning “rear; back; behind”. Please see the map:<br><img height="auto"><br><br>(Note that, in Mandarin, <em>bei</em> 北 `North’ and <em>bei </em>背 `back; backside’ differ only in tone, and are etymologically related)<br>I’m curious if this polysemy exists in other areas as well, and if so, what would be the motivation? (Historical? Cultural? Religious? Cognitive? Climatic?)</div></div><div name="messageSignatureSection"><br>Regards,<div dir="auto">Ian</div></div><img alt="" src="https://www.polyu.edu.hk/emaildisclaimer/PolyU_Email_Signature.jpg"><p><br><em><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">Disclaimer:</font></em></p><p style="margin-left:0.5in"><i><font size="3" face="Times New
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