Re: Letf / Right, was Re: Count and mass nouns

I had a look at butsuri’s discussion about english,
hausa and tamil points of view. I’m not absolutely
convinced, because maybe the translation of hausa or
tamil concepts into english might not be just so easy.

But if we suppose that they were translated correctly,
that would mean that:
- the English are egocentric: they look at things from
their own point of view. The right and left side of
the object is their own right and left, what the
object hides is “behind”, what it doesn’t is “in front
of”
- the Hausa are wanderers and used to walk in line:
the front is the general movement direction, left and
right are the same for the whole column, including the
speaker
- the Tamils are anthropocentrists, or personifiers :
they consider the object as it was a person facing
them.

But I think that there is a lot of  fancy in there.
Everybody could think in the 3 ways described,
depending of the situation. For instance, in French,
when facing a person, we often say “à gauche – enfin
non, à ta droite”, meaning that we’re trying to adapt
(correct) our words to match the addressee’s point of
view. “Derrière” is ambiguous: it can mean “at the
back of something / somebody” or “what is hidden or
kept away by an obstacle”. Etc. So we often have to
add circumlocutions to precise what we really want to
say.

OT P.S. I liked the myth about the kangaroo, a little
further. I heard nearly the same story in Ivory Coast
about the name of the capital, “Abidjan”. It’s been
said that long ago, a French officer once asked a poor
African guy: “what’s the name of this place ?”, and
the guy, frightened, answered in his own language
something meaning “Well, I just came back from
gathering branches (or leaves)”, which sounded somehow
like “Abidjan”, so the French decided the place was
definitely Abidjan.

--- Carsten Becker <post@...> wrote:
> So you might be interested in
> http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.php?t=516.

=====
Philippe Caquant

"Le langage est source de malentendus."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

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