Re: Clockwise without clocks

Carsten Becker wrote at 2005-04-02 12:13:26 (+0200)
 >
 > I was told that all those claims like "in Australia, water in
 > toilets turns the other way round" are nonsense. But then, I may
 > have misunderstood that, because corriolis power was mentioned in
 > one breath with that. And in fact, corriolis powers do not exist.
 >

Eh?  The Coriolis force is a real phenomenon.  (There's a sense in
which it "doesn't exist", in that it's just a consequence of taking
your measurements in a rotating frame, but that's irrelevant to the
question of what it does to water going down a plughole.)

The fact is though, that over the size of a sink or toilet, the
Coriolis force is too small to have more than a slight statistical
effect over which way the water goes.  You can easily make the water
go the "wrong" way.  It does account for the direction of rotation of
hurricanes and other large weather systems, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force

 >
 > On Friday 01 April 2005 02:19 +0100, Doug Dee wrote:
 >
 >  > Ok, that's perfectly clear now.  Of course, it assumes the
 >  > language in question has words for "right" and "left."  Are
 >  > those universal?  I seem to recall reading that some cultures
 >  > did not distinguish right & left.
 >
 > IIRC the Chinese as well as other cultures have N/E/S/W
 > instead. There are indeed people who know where the
 > absolute directions are most of the time. I couldn't tell.
 >

I'm quite sure the Chinese distinguish left and right, though it's
possible they use an absolute frame of reference more than in English
and German.  But there are cultures which use an absolute frame almost
exclusively.  Tenejapan Tzeltal, for example.

 | At night, in an alien city, facing a device never seen before
 | (namely a sink with two taps), one Tenejapan asked another, "Which
 | is the hot tap, the uphill (southern) or the downhill (northern)
 | one?".
    [1]

In language Guugu Yimithirr, one uses absolute terms even to refer to
body parts, saying things like "There's an ant on your south leg"
(although there are, IIRC, terms for the left and right hands).

It would be interesting to know whether there's any kind of
implicational universal relating terms for left/right (in either an
intrinsic or a relative sense) and clockwise/anticlockwise in
languages, and how strong it is.



[1] http://www.mpi.nl/world/pub/cognition.html
    or
    http://www.ling.lu.se/education/homepages/ALS021/ReturningTables.pdf
    (in response to
    http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/download/techreports/2000/00-03.pdf)

    There's been some interesting debate in recent years about possible
    Whorfian effects of this kind of thing.

Reply