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What about if "clockwise" and "anticlockwise" are heliocentric? You could give them etymologies meaning "with the sun" and "against the sun". That seems the natural way to do it. Pete Bleackley The Fantastical Devices of Pete The Mad Scientist - http://fantasticaldevices.blogspot.com Emily Semantic Recommendation - https://emily-petebleackley.rhcloud.com -----Original Message----- From: Logan Kearsley <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Fri, 20 Nov 2015 7:38 pm Subject: Mixed-centric Coordinate System The "errors in transitioning coordinate systems" thread was very popular, so I'm hoping I can ride coattails on that and this will become popular too... The conlanging and culture-building for Amalishke have come into minor conflict, and I'd like to get some outside opinions on how to resolve it. The speakers of Amalishke live entirely in a canyon system, and primarily in one big main canyon- think "Lichtenstein dropped into the Grand Canyon" for a *very* rough idea. And they are isolated from contact with other cultures who might otherwise influence their choice of direction-words. It thus seems highly appropriate that they would make use of a geocentric coordinate system, based on the major axis of the canyon / river system. However, it has already been established that Amalishke has grammaticalized direction-markers on verbs (primarily used with verbs of motion, but metaphorically extensible to all kinds of other stuff, like "look at"). That in and of itself is not necessarily problematic- there's no reason you couldn't have grammaticalized markers for "upstream"/"downstream"/"towards the left-of-up/right-of-up canyon wall"- but it has also already been established that two of those markers are used in an egocentric manner (or least vehicle-centric, of the port/starboard variety- but that seems much less likely to grammaticalize) to indicate "turn left" and "turn right", as instructions to a boat pilot. I have come up with a couple of ideas so far: 1. The inflectional system is *old*, and, when not being used in an explicitly deictic manner (i.e., "go *there*"), is basically egocentric because it's left over from a time before these people's ancestors immigrated to the canyons. Meanwhile, independent directional words, which have been coined or had their meanings shift more dramatically, are geocentric. 2. Everything is actually explicitly deictic or geocentric, except that the "right" and "left" markers actually refer to *rotation* rather than a linear direction; i.e., they would be more accurately translated as "turn clockwise" and "turn counterclockwise". This would seem very ego-centric on the surface, but the underlying geocentrism would appear if you had to give instructions to someone, e.g., hanging upside down- not a common occurrence, I presume, but if you did, "clockwise" would always mean "as seen from above" (i.e., fixed to the reference frame of the canyon), not necessarily from your point of view. This would also show up in the need for different circumlocutions to discuss rotations in a vertical, rather than horizontal, plane. -l.