Deasil/widdershins

[John Cowan <cbmvax!UUNET.UU.NET!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan>]

(I copied this message from newlang, a list for developers and observers
of the predicate language Voksigid, now under development by Bruce Gilson
and others.)

Jim Carter writes:

> > >And don't forget deasil-widdershins, very
> > >important.

Bruce Gilson replies:

> > Come again? "Deasil" I've never seen; "widdershins" I've seen but I don't
> > know what it means. Or was that a joke?

Jim Carter explains:

> They are the helicity directions.  Deasil is the direction the sun goes
> around the land (in England, this being English), i.e. clockwise if the
> clock is face up on the ground, or counterclockwise in the more usual
> situation that you're looking straight at it.  It corresponds to
> negative angular change, i.e. Y to X with +Z being the spin axis,
> and a standard handedness coordinate system.
>
> Widdershins is the opposite; the Earth itself spins in a widdershins
> direction, with the Eurocentric axial direction.  Standard screws
> are widdershins.  Being anti-sun it has underworld connotations.  If you
> walk (or dance the bransle grave) around a post with your left shoulder
> nearer the post, you move in a widdershins direction.
>
> While in the macroscopic world the sign of the helicity is rather
> arbitrary and confusing to remember, helicity is a physical absolute
> in that (if I got all the signs right) only deasil neutrinos exist.

Lojban does not have these spatial directions in its tense system.  Should
they be added?  We just added "coincident", "north", "south", "east", and
"west", so the list of FAhA (space direction) cmavo is still open.

Here is the current list of Lojban direction tense words.  Note that each
has two translations given, one for static relationship and the other for
motion.  They fall into pairs for the most part.

in front of             forward
behind                  backward
on the left of          leftward
on the right of         rightward
above                   upward
below                   downward
within                  into
surrounding             orbiting
transfixing             passing through
next to                 approximating
bordering               moving along the border of
adjacent to             contacting
towards                 arriving at
away from               departing from
inward                  approaching
outward                 receding from
tangential to           passing by
coincident with         moving to coincide with
north of                northward
south of                southward
east of                 eastward
west of                 westward

The last four were added to accomodate the cultures that use N-S-E-W as normal
reference rather than speaker-centered directions like left-right-front-back.
Navajo is perhaps the most well-known culture that does this.

"inward" and "outward" refer to direction towards or away from the speaker's
location, or whatever the origin is.

"towards" and "away from" refer to direction towards or away from some other
point.

--
cowan@snark.thyrsus.com         ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan
                e'osai ko sarji la lojban