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Comment by angiosperm | Hacker News Reader

There are languages that have no relative directions. You never "turn left", you only "turn south" or whatever.

People who grow up with one of those as their first language all have absolute direction, even two-year-olds. If their boat overturns at sea in a storm, they will never doubt whether their boat blew away to the north or south. Everybody has to get it right just to be able to speak with comprehensible grammar, just the way you need to know what is past or to come.

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What are some languages like that? Also does this ability mean they might have any beyond random ability to tell north and south when they were dropped to a new location, being blindfolded before? I assume there are hints like sun position depending on the day, so that could help them.

Several [1] (of many in total [2]) of Australian indigenous languages - although all native speakers tend to have exceptional spatial orientation.

Also, traditionally they're territorial over large areas (eg: quarter the size of the UK) but over the course of a lifetime commonaly travel all corners of tat area - "randomly dropped" means they'll recognise vegetation, landforms, spot shadows, see water flow trace on the ground from up high looking out .. all the natural world things that orientate people who live there in the same manner as (most) urban people navigate cities; major freeways, tall buildings, changing architecture styles from region to region.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language

[2] https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...

But I guess if they were taken from there and dropped somewhere in the northern hemisphere they would fail?

Depends - as I learned when I moved to the US at least some of my mental maps are based on where the sun is in the sky (and the sun and moon are upside down there) took me a few months for it to all turn around in my head, there are still parts of the first places I visited which are backwards in my mental maps 40 years later

In the sense of not knowing where they are in (say) germany, a country they've never visited, then "yes" they'd "fail".

They might even have to resort to pulling out their iPhone and ringing a relative who's living in Germany.

In the sense of not being able to survive in a Mexican desert if they were originally a desert dweller .. then I suspect they'd get by - ditto coastal, river, forrest, dwellers.

Survival skils transfer well enough across known similar habitats, a western desert nomad would be on the tough end of a learning curve in Alaska.

I mean that they would lose ability to tell where is north. Because theoretically, but probably not in practice they could have some sort of magnetic sense like birds are thought to have so it would translate beyond hemispheres. But unlikely since they never needed cross hemisphere ability. Also haven't heard of people developing a magnetic sense so far.

But I do think some mammals may have magnetic sense so maybe...

I specifically meant fail as in ability to determine north, not survival, put down or any sort of other negative reason to be clear.

> I mean that they would lose ability to tell where is north.

You're aware, I trust, that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, regardless of hemisphere?

FWiW this isn't a theorectical "what if" .. right from the get go Europeans were taking southern hemisphere indigenous people to the northern hemisphere:

https://australian.museum/about/history/exhibitions/trailbla...

https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/aboriginal...

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