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

Alex Francois alex.francois.cnrs at gmail.com
Sat Dec 26 15:51:29 UTC 2020


dear all,

Fascinating discussion.  Since Pacific languages have been mentioned, I
thought I'd send a note on cardinal systems in *Oceanic* languages — a
family of about 500 languages, part of the larger Austronesian phylum.

tl;dr:  Oceanic languages do *not* show the connection that has been
reported from various families in this thread, between 'left'/'right' and
sun-based cardinal directions.
________
*Oceanic systems of absolute directions*

The Proto-Oceanic system is the ancestor of the modern systems still used
in the languages of Island Melanesia (eastern PNG, Solomon Islands,
Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji), as well as Micronesia and Polynesia.  While
there are local variations, all Oceanic languages share common principles
about space orientation.

'Left' and 'right' are usually just nouns referring to sides of the human
body. They are hardly ever projected into space to encode spatial relations.

Instead, all spatial directions, whatever the distance, use a geocentric
system based on an absolute Frame of reference (Levinson 1996, Palmer
2002). It is thus common to hear sentences like “*Can you sit further
southeast?*” or “*My plate is the one on the seaward side.*” (even if the
sea can't be seen)

The cardinal system of Oceanic languages features not two, but *one
cardinal axis*, oriented Northwest — Southeast.  This cardinal axis is
almost always lexified Down [“NW”] – Up [“SE”].
While it was sometimes hypothesized this axis had to do with the direction
of the sun (with “East” = “up”?), there is now consensus that the cardinal
axis was in fact based on the *wind*, so the lexical contrast is
effectively Down[wind] vs. Up[wind].

More precisely, the cardinal axis is based on the dominant trade winds,
which (south of the equator) blow from Southeast. These were the main winds
followed by Austronesian “Lapita” sailing navigators as they colonized the
western half of the Pacific, initially between 1400 and 800 BC. (The famous
“Polynesian navigators”, who colonized the rest of the Pacific many
centuries later, are their descendants.)

As it happens, most of the exploration and colonization of the Pacific took
place by sailing "up", that is, southeast – from the Bismarck archipelago
(PNG) towards Fiji and Samoa, etc.

By comparing systems from various Oceanic subgroups (cf. Senft ed. 1997),
in 2004 I proposed to reconstruct the space system of POc as follows:

   - *Directions at sea* employed a single cardinal axis, oriented NW–SE,
   and lexified **sake *'up' / **sipo *'down' (resp. for 'upwind' /
   'downhill')
   - *Directions on land* used a main axis contrasting 'inland' /
   'seawards',
   which could also be encoded **sake *'up' / **sipo* 'down' (this time
   standing for 'up-' / 'down-hill', or 'up-' / 'down-river').
   Orthogonal to it was a neutral, symmetrical axis glossed 'across' (cf.
   Ozanne-Rivierre 1997, Palmer 2002).


[image: image.png]

________

*About the system's diversification in modern Oceanic languages*

With such a system as their source, many languages couldn't resist the
temptation of replacing the ambiguous 'across' axis with the (usefully
asymmetrical) cardinal axis on land too.That cardinal axis (initially
oriented NW–SE), even though it's etymologically based on trade winds,
commonly ended up adapted to the shape of each island, so as to run
parallel to the shoreline. This would allow the cardinal axis to be used
orthogonally to the 'uphill / downhill' axis, so as to form a neat system
based on four quadrants.

As a result, superficial observation shows a cardinal axis running *W–E* in
some Oceanic lgs, but *N–S* in other languages, depending on the topography
of each particular island. Yet using appropriate tests, it is generally
possible to retrieve the underlying, emic axis based on the navigational
scale;  and this generally comes back to a NW–SE axis.  In other terms, a
West-East axis lexified "down–up" in a modern Oceanic language is not based
on the sun, but results from a 45° rotation of the wind-based NW–SE axis.

In most modern Oceanic languages, on land you effectively use four
different directionals. In some specific locations, it may superficially
resemble a cardinal system N/W/S/E, but  underlyingly it is really a system
combining a fixed cardinal axis ('upwind = SE' + 'downwind = NW') with a
topographic axis ('uphill' + 'downhill') whose absolute orientation depends
on one's location on an island.
Modern speakers acquire their system on land, and are usually unaware of
the etymological connection with winds. They just learn that 'up' and
'down' are used on the horizontal plane in an arbitrary way.

In most languages, the lexical clash between two orthogonal 'up/down' axes
was resolved by relexifying the land axis, and this is where modern
languages show the most diversity. Thus in Mwotlap (N. Vanuatu), the
land-sea axis was relexified to 'in'/'out':
[image: image.png]

But the directional system can be very different even in very close
languages, e.g. Mwotlap's neighbour Mwerlap (François 2015):

[image: image.png]

In other places, especially in Polynesia (see Lavondès 1983, Cablitz 2006
for Marquesan), the up/down directionals were relexified using nouns such
as 'sea'/'lagoon' or 'bush'.

These examples provide a glimpse of how the directional system of
Proto-Oceanic, initially made of two simple up–down axes (François 2004,
Ross 2004), was able to diversify into many different, and sometimes quite
complex, modern systems of spatial orientation.

_____________

*References*

   - Cablitz, Gabriele H. 2006. *Marquesan: A grammar of space*. New York:
   Mouton de Gruyter.
   - François, Alexandre. 2003. Of men, hills and winds: Space directionals
   in Mwotlap
   <http://alex.francois.online.fr/data/AlexFrancois_SpaceDirectionalsMwotlap_OL2003.pdf>.
   *Oceanic Linguistics* 42(2). 407–437.
   - Francois, Alexandre. 2004. Reconstructing the geocentric system of
   Proto Oceanic
<http://alex.francois.online.fr/AFpub_articles_e.htm#12>. *Oceanic
   Linguistics* 43(1). 1–31.
   - François, Alexandre. 2015. The ins and outs of “up” and “down”:
   Disentangling the nine geocentric space systems of Torres and Banks
   languages
   <http://alex.francois.online.fr/data/AlexFrancois_2015_North-Vanuatu-space-directionals.pdf>.
   In Alexandre François, Sébastien Lacrampe, Michael Franjieh & Stefan
   Schnell (eds.), *The languages of Vanuatu: Unity and diversity* (Studies
   in the Languages of Island Melanesia 5), 137–195. Canberra: Asia-Pacific
   Linguistics.
   - Lavondès, Henri. 1983. Le vocabulaire marquisien de l’orientation dans
   l’espace. *L’Ethnographie* 79 (1). 35–42.
   - Levinson, Stephen. 1996. Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question:
   Crosslinguistic evidence. In Paul Bloom, Mary Peterson, Lynn Nadel &
   Merrill Garrett (eds.), *Language and space*, 109–170. Cambridge, MA:
   The MIT Press.
   - Ozanne-Rivierre, Françoise. 1997. Spatial references in New Caledonian
   languages. In Gunter Senft (ed.), 84–100.
   - Palmer, Bill. 2002. Absolute spatial reference and the
   grammaticalisation of perceptually salient phenomena. In Giovanni Bennardo
   (ed.), *Representing space in Oceania: Culture in language in mind*
   (Pacific Linguistics), vol. 523, 107–157. Canberra: Australian National
   University.
   - Ross, Malcolm. 2003. Talking about space: terms of location and
   direction. In Malcolm Ross, Andrew Pawley & Meredith Osmond (eds.), *The
   lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The physical environment
   <https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt24hfkc> *(Pacific Linguistics), vol.
   2, 229–294. Canberra: Australian National University.
   - Senft, Gunter (ed.). 1997. *Referring to space: Studies in
   Austronesian and Papuan languages* (Oxford Studies in Anthropological
   Linguistics). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

_______

Best wishes for the holiday season,
Alex

------------------------------

Alex François

LaTTiCe <http://www.lattice.cnrs.fr/en/alexandre-francois/> — CNRS–
<http://www.cnrs.fr/index.html>ENS
<https://www.ens.fr/laboratoire/lattice-langues-textes-traitements-informatiques-et-cognition-umr-8094>
–Sorbonne nouvelle
<http://www.univ-paris3.fr/lattice-langues-textes-traitements-informatiques-cognition-umr-8094-3458.kjsp>
Australian National University
<https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/francois-a>Academia Europaea
<https://www.ae-info.org/ae/Member/François_Alexandre> – Academia.edu
<https://cnrs.academia.edu/AlexFran%C3%A7ois>
Personal homepage <http://alex.francois.online.fr/>

------------------------------

On Sat, Dec 26, 2020 at 9:37 AM Johanna Mattissen <
Johanna.Mattissen at uni-koeln.de> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> *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.*
>
> Various orientation systems have been described by the Nijmegen project
> group and Ozanne-Rivierre and where orientation is with respect to
> landmarks like mountains and rivers or to winds, cardinal directions are
> seen from the respective viewpoint. In Hupa, North and downstream are the
> same direction.
> West Greenlanders face the sea for their orientation system with the
> mountains in their back, so North and right are the same direction (cf.
> demonstrative system).
> As for Mainland NE Asia directions may be oriented at and/or calqued from
> China as the dominant power of the region.
> The Nivkh (Lower Amur and Sakhalin island) have *ari *'north wind' and
> j-ari-d ~ jəri-d’ 'follow s.o./s.th.' besides 'side wind' and 'onshore
> (south) wind' (otherwise the orientation system is based on the Amur river
> and the mountains or the sea).
>
> Best,
> Johanna
>
>
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020 at 08:33, Jonathon Lum <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>
> 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> 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:
>>
>>
>> (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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Lingtyp mailing listLingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.orghttp://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>>
>>
>>
>
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