Four cardinal directions is the obvious idea we get from the Germanic languages. However, Finnish has eight cardinal directions (or at least, eight named directions whose names are not derived from the other directions).
All languages I know seem to form intermediate directions by compounding them - even Finnish, although it starts compounding them one step later than most (and thus no silly things like west-by-northwest or västnordväst, you just get pohjois-luode). Is this the only manner by which we could form intermediates? Some other approaches could reasonably well work - morphemes meaning 'half', 'up/over', 'down/under', 'behind', 'in front of', 'little', 'big', 'off', etc could work. Of course, in these cases arbitrary meanings have to be assigned, but that's the point, really. There isn't even necessarily any need for a consistent usage.
Further, in some places, there may even be less of a need for precise directions in part of the compass, and thus compound-terms are coined as needed for that direction, whereas greater granularity is used for another part of the compass.
When I asked about that in our discussion, what I was wondering about is if there are languages that use e.g. 5 or 6 cardinal directions as opposed to our 4 or your 8 (which also a multiple of 4).
ReplyDeleteAnother idea regarding cardinal directions: Manam is spoken on one specific island and has four basic direction words that don't match cardinal directions (specifically, they mean: inland, seaward, to the left when facing the sea, to the right when facing the sea). Languages spoken in a geographically constrained environment may have direction words corresponding to their surroundings in a similar way.
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