Do we really need West and South when we can use negative North and negative East?
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.
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)
Why do we have down when we can just use negative up?
Why do we have subtraction when we can just add a negative number?
Isn’t that exactly how computers work?
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.
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.
What goes up, must come negative-Up
One step forward and two steps un-forward.
180° of Arctica and then 180°of Antarctica. Reasonable.
Better question is why don’t they have 8? I hate saying “north by north east”.
Northeast would be one of the 8 already. North by northeast is the direction between north and northeast
I understand that. If we had a word for north east, let’s say “yest”, then I wouldn’t have to say “north by north east”, I could just say “north yest”.
You gotta “nor-nor-east” instead, that’s a blast.
Do we really need West and South when we can use negative North and negative East?
Yes of course.
Otherwise I couldn’t say anymore: “I am looking North and my butt is looking South”.
And how would you even pronounce south-Southwest then? Impossible unless you are quite drunk!
/s
anti-north-northeast doesn’t sound unreasonable, but that’s being logical instead of just thinking about two directions, as written in text, as OP is
Try all the 16 possibilities and then see how many “antis” you really need there.
In all cases, 2 at most.
North
North-north-east
North-east
North-east-east
East
Anti-north-east-east
Anti-north-east
Anti-north-north-east (south-north-east is impossible so the second anti would be redundant)
Anti-north
Anti-east-anti-north-north (reversed word order to distinguish it further)
Anti-east-anti-north
Anti-east-east-anti-north
Anti-east
Anti-east-east-north
Anti-east-north
Anti-east-north-northAnti-north-north-east (south-north-east is impossible so the second anti would be redundant)
These extra complications make it even more unusable that the anti thing itself LOL
I was assuming a conlang situation where “north” referred more to the axis, rather than the direction.
Anti-north-north would be more “reversed-vertical-vertical” meaning it’s reversed vertical (south), and closer to the vertical axis than the horizontal axis. North would just be “vertical” without being reversed.
I don’t know what you are even talking about (and too lazy to put it into a translator now).
But I know that North and South are terms that must be usable for everybody. So, especially for such people who don’t know what you are even talking about.
Essentially: it’s not designed as a change from North/East/South/West, it’s designed as a from-scratch way to refer to those directions.
The sun rises in the East and sets in the West, so let’s say East is “Sun” and West is “Setting-Sun.”
Polaris/The North Star is in the North, so let’s call that direction “Star” and the other direction “No-Star.”
When you say “Setting-Sun-Sun-Star,” you’re saying the direction is more similar to the path the sun takes through the sky than it is to the North Star, and in the direction the sun sets.
16 directions is pretty arbitrary anyway though, usually 8 is enough and then you don’t have the confusion of repeated words.
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
55 73 65 20 68 65 78 20 66 6f 72 20 74 65 72 73 65 6e 65 73 73 20 62 72 75 68 0a 0a 41 6c 73 6f 20 74 68 69 73 20 69 73 20 73 74 69 6c 6c 20 61 73 73 75 6d 69 6e 67 20 55 54 46 2d 38 20 6f 72 20 61 74 20 6c 65 61 73 74 20 41 53 43 49 49 2c 20 73 6f 20 77 74 68 20 6c 6d 61 6f
On the other hand, 8000+ characters seems kinda fun…
握草泥马币
hint
The joke is “wo cao ni ma bi”, change the tones and you got 我操你妈逼 🤭
oh you salty dog you
…(🤷♂️)
Why do we have 2 separate words for good and bad? Good and ungood are totally sufficient.
Spin it further and get rid of “great” and “outstanding”. I suggest using plus good and double plus good.
The complement of good, u good, I cludes things that are neither good not bad (neutral)
That’s actually how it works in Irish. The word for good is deas, while the word for bad is deas prefixed with the negating particle mí, so mídheas.
(There are still separate words for tge cardinal directions).
Is it? I tried checking in a dictionary but it didn’t list mídheas as a word and “deas” was defined as right/nice/honest, not just “good”
“negative Eastern countries” has a nice ring to it.
Other languages kinda do. In Spanish, east and west are este and oeste. Italian is est and ovest.
And I say we don’t have enough names, we should have names for at least 30° and 45° increments.
We do, they’re just combinations of the 90 degree ones.
Southwest. North-Northeast.
Yeah, there are 32 named points on a compass, one every 11.25 degrees, you can even fractionalize it to get even more granular
Southwest by west half west for example is 242 degrees
Most Mediterranean cultures used to have names for at least eight winds, each at 45 degrees from each other. Greeks (and therefore Romans) used twelve, at 30 degrees.
Here’s a classic navigator’s wind rose, for instance, with 32 different directions based on eight named winds (might be a bit hard to read on dark backgrounds, here’s the original SVG):
.svg){kind=link}