I think the idea of directions came before the idea of negative.

Just guessing here, but I would think it's for for clarity and brevity. West and South are shorter to say and distinct enough to avoid being easily misheard causing somebody to go in the opposite direction than intended.

Left and Minusleft

Why stop at two, when you could stop at just one?

North

Negative North = south

Negative 90 North = west

90 North =east

east and eastn't

Why do we have subtraction when we can just add a negative number?

Negative north negative east airlines doesn't have a good ring to it though.

Why do we have 26 letters? Why not just communicate in binary!

01010100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110110 01100101 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101110 01100001 01110100 01110101 01110010 01100001 01101100 00100001

Why do we have down when we can just use negative up?

What goes up, must come negative-Up

And I say we don't have enough names, we should have names for at least 30° and 45° increments.

So you'd have states like North Dakota and Negative North Dakota?

How would that be any easier?

Better question is why don’t they have 8? I hate saying “north by north east”.

I would not be surprised compasses were invented before negative numbers

edit

negative numbers : 200 BCE
compasses : as early as 202 BCE

(these are just from a cursory search, I am not a specialist)

This is just the Minecraft coordinates system and it sucks. "OK I'm at the coords, where's the--oh fuck, it was -3002, 108 not 3002, 108."

If the four cardinal points bother you, better not look up wind roses or rhumbline networks...

This is basic coordinate usage. Negative latitudes are South. And 180 or -180 is half a planet away from the prime meridien. West of England are negative longitudes.

In addition to what others have already said, it'd be really silly to make one a negative of the other in the most basic sense, too.

There have been so many issues with electrons having a "negative" charge, and that's a binary situation! It would be so much worse to introduce implied favoritism with basic directions.

For most of human history people who couldn't do math, or read, or understand a map, have been communicating directions to each other.

4 directions is just enough to tell someone which way to face, without being too many to remember.

North and south are fundementally different, climate and biosphere -wise, so i don't think it would ever make sense to people to modify the same word to describe two very different things. East and west maybe less so, but dawn and dusk are pretty important differences.

Some polynesian cultures use two main direction words, which usually translate as something like mountain-ward and beach-ward.

Whatever, Nancy.

Other languages kinda do. In Spanish, east and west are este and oeste. Italian is est and ovest.

Why even use WORDS for it? That's too long.

Let's use ternary numbers, one for each of North-South and East-West. A 1 is center, 2 is north/east, and 0 is south/west.

So North is now 21. South east is 02.

Much easier to say like that, and it covers all 8 directions too and the center (11) too.

@NorthWestWind@lemmy.world

Your new username is -South -East Wind lmao

As a practical matter, relative directions are already hard enough, where I might say that Colorado is east of California, and California is west of Colorado.

To use +/- East would mean there's now just a single symbol difference between relative directions. California bring -East of Folorado, and Colorado being +East of California.

Also, we need not forget that the conventional meridian used for Earth navigation is centered on Greenwich in the UK, and is a holdover from the colonial era where Europe is put front-and-center on a map and everything else is "free real estate". Perhaps if the New World didn't exist, we would have right-ascension based system where Greenwich is still 0-deg East and Asia is almost 160-deg East. Why would colonialists center the maps on anywhere but themselves?

Why don't clocks have just 4 numbers?

180° of Arctica and then 180°of Antarctica. Reasonable.