I have remarked before on the almost universal cluelessness one encounters among the Chinese with regard to reading maps or giving directions.
The latest twist on this?
I'm subbing a few business classes for a friend this week at an IT centre up in the north of the city. Not being sure of the address, I was anxious to check with the course liaison as to where exactly I should be going - on which side of the street, Xueqing Lu, should I look out for this building?
"The south side," my contact told me by SMS.
Hmm. Xueqing Lu runs north-south.
5 comments:
Aha. "Side" must be one of those words subject to, um, easy misunderstanding. The contact may have understood it to mean "end"?
Now I'm wondering if geometry and... proprioception might be culturally learned (or not!) concepts. I'm sure you've seen one of those thought experiments in which a world globe (or projection, via map) is presented upside-down, with south at the top, and you have instructions to locate something familiar on it. Damned hard, without at least mentally imagining it flipped to "normal."
How to represent a rectangle in a Blogger comment...? Ah, I have an idea:
You're looking at a page in Froogville. At the top is the familiar "Froogville/Overspill of an irreverent mind" heading. The left side is blank (or rather, plain navy-blue); at the right, the Wu Yuren counter, Mr. Natural, all the archive links, etc.
We think of left and right as "sides" and top and bottom as "ends," true? If you rotate the page 90 degrees counter-clockwise, do the sides and ends rotate with the contents? Or is the left side fixed, a term now labeling what we used to call the "top"?
Put another way: given a rectangle of unequal "side" and "end" dimensions, do we take it for granted that the sides are the long dimensions, and the ends the short...?
Hmm. Feeling woolgathery this morning!
JES: some interesting comments. You might be interested in this NY Times article I read earlier today: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=1 about some very similar themes.
I don't think it was a 'side' and 'end' problem. I'd earlier asked which end (and referred to adjacent road junctions, rather than running the risk of her getting north and south mixed up). When I asked about which side of the road, I'd given the options east or west. So, "south" was a particularly weird glitch.
I believe the 'old style' Chinese maps were printed 'upside down', with south at the top (not sure how 'old' this is; but you still see it very commonly on the thumbnail maps for restaurants etc. on flyers and business cards), so they do get very easily confused about the points of the compass. However, most of them have little idea of how to read a map, and many, perhaps, have never seen one; so this doesn't completely explain their confusedness about north and south and so on. Moreover, they seem to get pretty easily confused about left and right (and up and down?!) as well; so, perhaps, as you say, JES, there is a wider problem of 'proprioception' in this culture?
J the N: Really liked that NYT piece; thank you!
I have sometimes wondered, Froog, about mapmaking.
It used to be said -- don't know if it still is -- that understanding television images as representations of the real world is a learned understanding. The claim was that when people film their cats, say, batting at birds on a TV show, the cats are responding just to movement -- not to birds.
Mapmaking (and reading, come to that) always struck me as something like that. Are there aboriginal tribes, say, who won't recognize a map of their home territory?
I didn't know that little factoid about old (however old)upside-down Chinese maps.
A familiar comic situation over here involves someone who can't read a map without re-orienting it to the way s/he is facing. Sometimes it's presented as something women do, but I've known enough men to do it, too.
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