Direcions in Native Japanese

We talked about the poor vocabulary of geometry in Native Japanese before. How about the directions. We have enough.

East  -  ひがし (hi-ga-shi; 東)
West -  にし (ni-shi; 西)
South -  みなみ (mi-na-mi; 南)
North -  きた (ki-ta; 北)
Right -  みぎ (mi-ghi; 右)
Left -  ひだり (hi-da-ri; 左)
Up -  うえ (u-e; 上)
Down -  した (shi-ta; 下)

We have but they are not so systematic in pronunciation. Only  ひがし (hi-ga-shi) and にし (ni-shi) have -shi at the end in common. These direction words are supposed to be used commonly but three of them ( ひがし (hi-ga-shi), みなみ (mi-na-mi) and ひだり (hi-da-ri)) are three letter words which are not easy to pronounce as two letter words (two letter words are very common in Native Japanese).


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