All languages I know of have four basic directions: left, right, backwards and forwards. Are there any that don't?

Maybe you could have just three: forwards, backwards-left and backwards-rigth? Or more then four, maybe with distinct names for some or all of the four in-between the common ones

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[–] 12 points 3 months ago (1 child)

I cannot find it anymore, but remember recently reading a blog post about a language where their concept of directions was "toward the river", "away from the river (or: into the jungle)", "down the river", "up the river", and they expressed only those directions. So when a western researcher asked them how they called "left" and "right", they gave different answers every time, or something like that…

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