Re: Languages with no words for left and right?

James Dolan wrote:
grammatim <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The French system is a lot easier to apply (but not helpful if
you don't have a map handy): you face the direction the river is
flowing and refer to the left bank and the right bank.

That's the standard convention in English too. To be on the safe
side, guidebooks describing the route up a river use the terms
"true left" and "true right", meaning, of course, the bank on the
reader's right and left respectively.

It is?? What guidebook publishers do _you_ read? Not Lonely Planet,
Michelin, or DK Eyewitness.

googling on "upriver" and "true left" together seems (from a very
casual inspection) to give somewhat of a preponderance of new zealand
hits.

You might well have a point there. A lot of my river-bashing has indeed been done in NZ (and most of the rest hasn't involved reference to any guidebook or official documentation anyway.) I'm pretty sure the same convention is used by Australian geographers too, but haven't checked.

A quick glance at my Starr's Guide and a couple of other USA guidebooks seems to show that the usual practice there is to refer to the east bank etc. Which resolves the ambiguity of terms like right and left, but can easily lead to confusion for any stream that doesn't flow in a straight line.

A hasty look at a few of my Lonely Planets (covering places in every continent except Antarctica, where there aren't many rivers anyway) doesn't reveal anything relevant. Anyway, LP is based and published in Melbourne, so probably follows Australian conventions. Which LP were you using, Peter, and what convention did it use?

I find it hard to believe Michelin deals much with this sort of thing. I've never heard of DK Eyewitness.

Whatever, I freely acknowledge that my reference to "the standard convention in English" may have been somewhat of an exaggeration.

John.

.

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