Like I said, there's no linguistic barrier against giving directions based on left or right in Balinese. It's merely cultural. Balinese people just don't do it when talking to each other. You might say, they demonstrate solidarity with each other against outsiders by using this geographic knowledge which sets them apart. (In Honolulu, which was originally populated by very distant linguistic relatives of the Balinese, the buses run "windward" and "leeward" even in English.) And besides, it's not very deep knowledge anyway --- the direction words are literally seaward-sunriseward-mountainward-sunsetward. What's more confusing is, there's Balinese villages both north and south of the big mountain, and they all use those directional words according to their local geography. Thus the ordering of the points is different. A counterclockwise turn for a southerner and a counterclockwise turn for a northerner take them through the above-mentioned points in opposite orders. I suspect the problem with the Balinese dancer boy to which the NYT is alluding comes from the following problem: his teacher wanted him to do something in a circle and he kept going the wrong way.
Which leads to the final rambling point: you'll probably notice that all the languages the NYT have mentioned are tiny ones you haven't heard of, unless you did a linguistics degree or came from the same province. I highly doubt all the big languages have always been purely egocentric-direction ones. Rather, they became that way when people who came from widely separate geographic areas had to use them with each other. It's easy to keep track of your North and South if you're in the middle of a giant desert or in a village where you've lived your whole life. It's hard if you're a merchant who sailed from the other end of the archipelago and walked down the streets of an unfamiliar port city, and so, you start asking for, and receiving, left/right directions instead.
I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for "yes", but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or similar.
Many argue that latin did indeed have the word for yes, namely "ita", but all the dictionaries I looked at translate it as "so; thus; indeed; ..."
Other languages like japanese rely much on repetition of the verb but do have words for yes and no (hai to iie).
I wonder if it really makes a difference to think in a language which doesn't have a word for yes and no (for whatever reasons is not present in the language, historical stigma etc).
I see how it can change your way to discuss with people: "don't be tricky! answer simply, ehm uhm" but I feel this doesn't count as a major mind shaping issue.
Don't get me wrong, I was intrigued as anyone with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but I'm aware that sometimes some intriguing memes get more resonance than they deserve.
la no
kalaa definitely not
balaa but not
lam did not
laysa is not
lan will not
However, colloquial arabic just uses the ma- prefix and collapses all those different words into one: maa/mish/mush/makoo, depending on the dialect. E.g. "I will not try":
mish hagarrab (Egyptian)
maa `amjarab (Levantian)
makoo nijarib (Iraqi/Kuwaiti)
maabaa nijarib/nigarib (Yemeni, North/South)
Then they have a way to express affirmation.
The trick is probably that some concepts are activated when our language center parses more than one word; we don't think about them as separate words. There are plenty of examples in the vocabularies of various languages, one of my favorites is the word 'alarm':
I asked a lot of people in the Italy if they recognize what the word "allarme" comes from. Surprisingly only few recognized the exhortation "all'armi!" (to the weapons!) (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=alarm). Sometimes this effect creates a new word, but sometimes a concept remains indirectly expressed, while the speaker unconsciously extracts the high level meaning of it.
However, I noticed that most of the amateur discussions about linguistics scratch only the surface because mostly only nouns are touched.
For example when I was younger and still living in Croatia. A relative of mine was Macedonian and told me that they have a verb mood that is used when you state something which you are sure that is true, vs only being told that is true.
I'm not really sure what is that, after a bit of research I think it's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferential_mood.
"The inferential mood (abbreviated infer or infr) is used to report a nonwitnessed event without confirming it"
Does this shape the way you think?
After all, even English speakers are able to express the fact that they didn't witness an event; I guess they do, didn't check :-)
>> I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for "yes", but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or similar.
I have notice that people who have gender-neutral pronouns have a lot of trouble mixing up 'he' and 'she' in English.
An explanation as to why an argument isn't a proof doesn't "not work" simply because the statement being argued happens to be true. GP suggests that a particular argument is used to justify the claim that some language lacks some term, and he points out that that argument does not prove the claim.