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by schoen 3560 days ago
I've only heard of one example of the cardinal directions being used as a main orientation reference in day-to-day language: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...

I never read the research about this but examples are http://anthroweb.ucsd.edu/~jhaviland/Publications/ETHOSw.Dia... and http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:66622:3/compon... (very interesting stuff!).

Edit: I would highly recommend reading the 2nd paper (which includes some practical experiments testing how Guugu Yithimirr speakers thought about and remembered spatial positions and orientations). It's astonishing.

1 comments

The thing is, it doesn’t stop there.

Even colors depend on cultures heavily. The ancient greek are believed not to have seperated between yellow and green, other cultures similar.

Internationalization is a lot harder than it seems to most people. And then there’s also accessibility.

Even with traditional UIs where everything is hand made it’s already an extremely huge task, but a conversational UI is far more personal.

It has to deal with things like how much privacy or directness is expected in cultures, with taboos, it has to have a full perceptional model of the person who will hear it to be able to properly handle all this.