[Lingtyp] “Rear=North” in Mainland Northeast Asia

Sat Dec 26 10:44:58 UTC 2020

Dear all,

thank you for your helpful comments.
It seems that the colexification of “back” and “north” (and that of “front” and “south”) is in accordance of building houses in southward direction in China (as Guillaume pointed out), in Mongolia (as Stephen Matthews pointed out), and (as far as I know) Korea as well.
But it’s difficult to say that one is the cause of another. Because if the languages in this region refer to back/front as north/south and build houses facing south, then it’s hard to think that one is the cause of another, and it’s more likely that both are the effects of the same cause. That is, there must be some cultural norm associating back/front to north/south, whence its linguistic and architectural outcomes.
As to why that cultural norm would exist in the first place is mysterious. But as many have pointed out, it seems more or less universal that a culture decides that any one of the cardinal direction is the direction of reference (the front), and the refer to the remaining directions based on the direction of reference (as behind/left/right). This seems “natural” because humans are inclined to think everything from our physical, embodied viewpoint, and it’s just “easier” for us to refer to front and back of ourselves than refer to abstract directions like South and North.
Is there any geographical correlation with the cardinal-to-anatomical-mapping of directions? For example do cultures in the Northern Hemisphere (tend to) assign directions any differently than those living in the Southern Hemisphere? It would be an interesting research topic that requires large scale typology to investigate, but without big data we can only speculate.
Also, as Danqing mentioned, front/back is etymologically related to South/North in Chinese as well, but it’s curious why Sinitic languages (at least those that I’m aware of) “lost” this colexification at the synchronic level, while the MNEA languages “retain” it (although this association is almost forgotten by most of today’s Korean people).
And this association must have not lasted since forever - because, as Michael pointed out, Old Turkic and Old Uyghur, spoken in Mainland Northeast Asia, did not map directions that way. So it must be a relatively “recent” phenomenon, however recent it may be.
Below is a bigger version of the map I shared earlier with five more sample languages - and interestingly, I discovered that ssibara in Irabu Ryukyuan (Japonic) can also mean either back or North.

[cid:23E4F669C83A4E8AAD60860112C365F7]

From Hong Kong,
Ian
On 26 Dec 2020, 6:16 PM +0800, Frans Plank <frans.plank at ling-phil.ox.ac.uk>, wrote:
In the micro-area in Bavaria, Germany, described in this attached old paper of a Konstanz colleague of mine (it’s in German, ‘rear’ is in Section 5), ‘rear, behind’ (German hinten) are godforsaken places, at some distance from the deictic centre, in the north and north-east.   Where I come from, a town at the northernmost point of the river Danube, also in Bavaria, ‘rear, behind’ is east, be it near (such as the Bavarian Forest at the border to Czechia, once forming the Iron Curtain, then the end of the world, from the local point of view) or far (such as Russia, Siberia, East Asia in general).

It seems to me that the use of such behind/front directional deictics can be very micro-areal.  The concept of “hinterland”, area under the influence of a mercantile/cultural/political centre, plays an crucial role, overriding all other relevant factors for the choice of a deictic (down-river, up-river etc.), in what is imagined as being behind and in front.  Presumably this concept is not as idiosyncratic as the provenance of the term might suggest.

The etymologies of cardinal direction terms are a different matter from live directional deictics;  for the former, Bavarians Ost < dawn, sun-rise, West < evening, sun-down, like for many other Indo-Europeans/Indo-Germanics.

Frans

On 26. Dec 2020, at 08:32, Jonathon Lum <lum.jonathon at gmail.com<mailto:lum.jonathon at gmail.com>> wrote:

Dear Ian (and all),

A highly relevant paper on this topic (though not specifically on Northeast Asia) is:

Brown, Cecil H. (1983). 'Where do cardinal direction terms come from?'. Anthropological Linguistics. Vol. 25 (2). Pp. 121-161.

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.

Best,
Jonathon

On Sat, 26 Dec 2020 at 11:55, Siva Kalyan <sivakalyan.princeton at gmail.com<mailto:sivakalyan.princeton at gmail.com>> wrote:
Sanskrit likewise has dakṣiṇa (> "Deccan [plateau]"), which means both "right" and "south". And I just learned that teṉ in Tamil has the same polysemy. The terms for "north" do not mean "left" in either of these languages, though.

Siva

On 25 Dec 2020, at 9:18 pm, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de<mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:

Dear Ian (and all),

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.

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.

David

On 25/12/2020 08:29, JOO, Ian [Student] wrote:
Dear typologists,

I am currently working on a doctoral project focusing on the areality of Mainland Northeast Asia (Korea, Mongolia, Northeast China, but not Japan, Russian Far East, or Southern/Western China).
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:
[X]

(Note that, in Mandarin, bei 北 `North’ and bei 背 `back; backside’ differ only in tone, and are etymologically related)
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?)

Regards,
Ian
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