

An Australian language that doesn't have words for directions - yoyogirlie
http://blog.expectlabs.com/post/41953134422/how-language-shapes-reality-exploring-guugu-yimithirr

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defrost
The title as it stands is poor: "An Australian language that doesn't have
words for directions".

The thrust of the article is that the language of the Guugu Yimithirr people
of north Queensland doesn't have egocentric directional references (left /
right / relative to speaker) which is common to most of the (now largely
extinct) languages of northern Australia, from the Pilbara through the
Kimberleys, through Kakadu and on into Queensland (and may well be common to
the bulk of Australian Aboriginal languages).

This isn't quite as noteworthy as the claims by Daniel Everett that the
language of the Pirahã tribe in the Amazon Basin broke Chomsky’s theory of
universal grammar by lacking recursion.

