015. Moshi Migi ya Hidari ga Nakattara by Kyoko Inoue(Books I read in 2025)

First published in 1998, Inoue Kyoko’s book ‘Moshi Migi ya Hidari ga Nakattara’ (What if there was no Right or Left?) is a great book for anyone who is curious about how language influences the way we look at the world or how humans use languages to dissect the world around us. For instance, some languages have gendered nouns (like Hindi, Spanish or French), while some languages don’t have right or left, which might subtly affect how speakers think about objects and how they might have an acute sense of geography respectively.

So, here are some interesting examples cited by Kyoko.

The Tzeltal language spoken by the Tenejapa people in Mexico don’t have words for cardinal directions, and thus use uphill or downhill to indicate South and North respectively. Kyoko states that this is most probably due to the influence of the terrain in which this language is spoken. The village apparently is situated at a height of 900m and 2800m above sea level in the North-South axis. They also don’t have vocabulary for east-west directions and instead use, Kyoko says, landmarks to indicate positions in the East-West axis.

Another interesting example is that of the language of the Guugu Yimithirr of the Far North Queensland region in Australia, who use cardinal directions (North-South etc.) instead of relative directions such as Left and Right. Kyoko writes that the Guugu Yimithirr people would say ‘Move slightly to East/West’ for something like ‘Could you move over a little, please?.

The case of the English native speakers residing in the remote town of Alice Springs in Australia — home to the Arrernte/Aranda people and their language- using cardinal directions (like the Aranda language) at four times the rate at which English native speakers in Sydney use, is also an excellent case to show how languages are live and evolve all the time.

The choice of relative and cardinal directions by urban and rural Tamilians respectively in Madurai, has I think parallells in Kerala as well. People in rural Madurai apparently use cardinal directions to denote both geographic and immediate surroundings whereas Tamil spoken in urban Madurai use cardinal directions only for the former.

Through these and many other examples, Kyoko invites us into the world of linguistic anthropology by providing us glimpses into the fieldwork done by groups of cognitive anthropologists at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Like the ?symbolic? apple that fell from the tree where Newton sat, I remember as an undergraduate student having never seen snow, fascinated by the symbolic (and not necessarily scientific) example of the apparent ability of an Inuit speaker to perceive snow in a much more detailed manner than others because of her language.

How do human languages dissect space (Chapter 1), body (Chapter 2) and things (Chapter 3)? Kyoko takes us into this fascinating world of linguistic relativism, the theory that people who speak different languages may see the world differently because their languages highlight different things.

LibGuides defines Leisure Reading as “self-selected and independent reading of materials for personal and social purposes”. The ‘Books I read in 2025’ series of blog posts are the books that I have read in 2025 as part of my leisure reading. The inspiration for writing this series comes out of my frustration of forgetting the content of the books that I read and the impact the book had on me.