Four directions, plus... ?

So do the Finns use these 8 directions absolutely or referentially?
I mean, if someone gives you directions and they tell you to go west, do you go to the absolute west (where west always is) or do you go west from where you are at that point? I'm asking this because I know that some cultures have absolute direction. These people always know where the four directions are. I would be highly surprised if the Finns have absolute direction like this. Either way, absolute direction is a fascinating example of how language can influendce thought.

In Tetun, the lingua franca of East Timor, the words used for directions are:
East: Loro sae, meaning sunrise
West: loro monu meaning sunset
South: Tasi mane, literally meaning male sea, probably because the seas are rough on the south coast of Timor.

Norh: tasifeto meaning female sea.
I can't recall any words for Northeast, Southeast etc, they probbaly either use Indonesian or Portuguese words for them.

#20 -- I don't understand what you mean by the distinction between "to the absolute west (where west always is)" and "west from where you are at that point". Wherever I am, if I head towards the absolute west, I'm heading west, right?

Maybe Jantrao means there are cultures where people give directions in terms of North, South, East, and West instead of left and right?

If not: are there cultures where the West and East are defined in the same way as our North and South? (The Western standard concept of North and South are two points, while the West and the East are two lines.)

#23 -- I want to be sure I'm following you about the points and lines. You mean that there are North and South Poles but not East and West Poles?

I don't think those are really intrinsic to how people in the West feel about the directions. East is where the sun rises. North is to your left when you face the sunrise. Etc. Those concepts were around long before there was any idea that the earth rotated on an axis, and maybe even before there was a clear idea that the heavens rotated around the earth.

#24 -- Yes, no East and West Poles. In other words, if you hear that two people stand as far North as possible, you know they are standing on the same spot. If two people are as far West as you can get (by some definition), they could be a large distance from each other.

Good point about the East defining the four directions, but does every culture known to man use the sun as a reference point for directions?

By the way, where the sun rises changes a bit over the months, but our definition of the East does not. (This isn't an argument one way or the other, just an observation.)

#25 -- North and South don't change through the year though (North in the northern hemisphere being the direction of shadow cast by a stick when it's shortest, i.e. at solar noon; and you wouldn't have to be very sophisticated to determine true east as the right angle of that).

#2 -- I finally got around to refreshing my memory on the etymologies of the Germanic words. East is the most certain. It's the direction of the sun rise, from the same IndoEuropean root as Latin orient-, rising (and also related to aurora, dawn). West is related to Latin vesperus and Greek hesperos, evening, and may have to do with the sun going "down" There is a Sanskrit word avas = down which may be related. South may mean the sun direction, the part of the sky where you see the sun (in the Northern hemisphere). North is the most obscure. The Osco-Umbrians in pre-Roman Italy had a word nertro = left. That may be the idea of north (left as you face the rising sun; same idea as in Arabic shammal) but that's not a lot of evidence.

#26 -- Vinny: What you say about the shadow of the stick is true for the parts of the earth above the Tropic of Cancer and below the Tropic of Capricorn. For people in large parts of Africa (for example) the direction of the shortest shadow will change from North to South and back, or the other way around, during the course of a year.

#27 -- Right you are. But the direction of the sunrise won't shift as much there through the year, so if true north and south are harder to determine, true east and west are somewhat easier.

We've wandered a bit. What I meant to be saying in response to your #23 was that the idea that there is a single northernmost point isn't (to my mind) intrinsic to the word north even in western languages, it's information that came along after the word was established, and that we individually learn long after we learn the word. So a language that didn't have that information could still have a word that didn't feel any different from our ordinary conception of north, IMHO.

Is anyone interested in the fact that the streets in Baltimore align with magnetic north as it was when they were laid out c. 1800? OK, I thought not. Carry on.

Is anyone interested in the fact that that nonstop flights from NYC to Hong Kong take off and fly north until they can't fly north anymore and then fly south, without having changed direction? Probably not.