[Lingtyp] Languages with connotations for 'left' and 'right'

Thu Feb 28 14:59:55 UTC 2019

Dear Alec,

It's interesting that you used the term gauche in your email, since that means 'left' in French!

Kind regards,
Ellen

Dr. Ellen Smith-Dennis, FHEA
Assistant Professor
Centre for Applied Linguistics, The University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL
Email: E.Smith-Dennis at warwick.ac.uk OR E.L.Smith at uon.edu.au
Tel: (+44) (0)24 76 575912 (internal: 75912)

________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Alexander Coupe <ARCoupe at ntu.edu.sg>
Sent: 28 February 2019 14:08:07
To: Horia Calugareanu; lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Languages with connotations for 'left' and 'right'

Dear Horia,

There is likely to be a biological reason for this: approximately 90% of the world’s human population is right-hand dominant. So right-handedness is egocentrically assumed to be “normal” by the right-handed majority regardless of one’s language, and left-handedness is viewed as gauche.

Metaphor may be responsible for particular connotations associated with direction, e.g. up is positive, down/south is negative. You might also expand your investigation to look at deictic verbs of motion ‘go’ and ‘come’, which correlate with movement into a marked state, and conversely, return to an unmarked state in English and Thai, and possibly in other languages. A possible paper of interest is:

Gandour, Jack. 1978. ‘On the deictic uses of verbs of motion ‘come’ and ‘go’ in Thai. Anthropological Linguistics, v20 n9 p381-94.

Alec

Assoc. Prof. Alexander R. Coupe, Ph.D. | Linguistics and Multilingual Studies | Nanyang Technological University

School of Humanities 03-56, 48 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 639818

Tel: (65) 6592-1567 GMT+8h | Fax: (65) 6795-6525 | Email: arcoupe at ntu.edu.sg  | Web: http://nanyang.academia.edu/AlexanderCoupe

From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Horia Calugareanu <horia.calugareanu at gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, 28 February 2019 at 8:23 PM
To: "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org" <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: [Lingtyp] Languages with connotations for 'left' and 'right'

Dear colleagues,

I am putting together a semantic typology in order to test the following hypothesis:

Across languages, the word for left (side/direction) (or some derivation of it) tends to get a negative connotation, whereas the word for ‘right’ gets a positive one, if the effect exists.

Apart from Indo-European languages, where the effect is widely present, this is a non-exhaustive list of languages which prove the thesis: Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Fula, Golpa, Hungarian, Malay, Turkish.

Do you know of any other (preferably non-Indo-European) languages which help confirm or infirm the generalisation?

Finally, I am also researching whether the effect holds anyhow in languages with allocentric frames of reference (i.e. uphill/downhill, or north/south, instead of left/right). I haven’t been able to find any due to scarce resources, but some examples of languages with non-egocentric FoR are Tseltal, Haillom, Guugu Yimitirr, Kuuk Thaayorre.

Thank you very much.

Kind regards,
Horia Călugăreanu
University College London

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