21

Does anyone know of a connection, or some sort of established historical/etymological explanation why in a few languages, "the opposite of left" and "legal term" are the same or seemingly related words? Do they all have a common root? Did they develop independently?

Examples:

  • English: right - right
  • French: droit - droit
  • German: rechts - Recht
  • Polish: prawo - prawo
  • Russian: право - право
  • Finnish: oikea - oikea
  • Mungbam: -ntSEhE- -ntSEhE ("left/wrong")

If you know of more examples that have the same connection, you can add them to your answer.

curiousdannii
  • 6,193
  • 5
  • 26
  • 48
Rafael Emshoff
  • 313
  • 2
  • 7

3 Answers3

5

In medieval Christian theology, things that were left-handed were things that belonged to Satan (or were corrupted by him). This is where the Latin-derived word sinister became synonymous with evil (even in Latin sinestra meant unlucky as well as left). Right being the opposite of left therefore became associated with good purely by being the opposite.

Historically, the left side, and subsequently left-handedness, was considered negative in many cultures. The Latin word sinistra originally meant "left" but took on meanings of "evil" or "unlucky" by the Classical Latin era, and this double meaning survives in Italian, and in the English word "sinister".

Source.

Tangurena
  • 755
  • 4
  • 13
  • 7
    I understand now the connotation of left being bad and right good, but from what I've read so far, it originated before christian theology became dominant enough to influence language. Are the origins really in Latin? Or maybe earlier languages - what about outside of the indo-european scope? And if it should be Latin, is there a first documented usage? To when does this concept of left being bad and right good date back to? I remember something about babys in ancient greece being allowed to move their right hands first, while having their left hands kept bound... – Rafael Emshoff Sep 14 '12 at 17:15
  • @RafaelCichocki, the ancient Greeks also held that left=bad, with some beliefs such as "female sperm" came from the left testicle (this was later documented by Galen and unquestioned for 1500 years). Most European languages are derivatives of Latin. This belief in the "wrongness" of left-things may predate these cultures, but the Sea Peoples destroyed pretty much everyone in the Mediterranean region who could read or write at the end of the Bronze Age (about 1200BC). For more details, I refer you to: http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Bronze-Robert-Drews/dp/0691025916 – Tangurena Sep 14 '12 at 19:03
  • These words are older than medieval times. – Mark Beadles Sep 14 '12 at 19:15
  • 2
    Vjacheslav Ivanov (UCLA and RGGU) argues that the left-right dichotomy has been known since Ancient Egypt; left associated with women, right with men. As for Latin, there were other words too, laevus and scaevus. – Alex B. Sep 14 '12 at 23:36
  • 1
    By the way, Ivanov has extensive bibliography on this question - let me know if you'd be interested. Mallory and Adams 1997 are of the same opinion, "the semantic associations of 'left' in the various IE stocks (and also among many non-IE as right and left markedness is a universal) are broadly feminine and negative, i.e. left indicates the female side, matrilineality, chthonic, unlucky, unordered, weakness, and is expressed in polar opposition as 'north'" (p. 349). – Alex B. Sep 14 '12 at 23:49
  • As for the Latin words for "left", "sinister" replaced the older words, laevus and scaevus (taboo!). – Alex B. Sep 14 '12 at 23:57
  • 1
    also, note this usage of sinister in Latin: IIC. "With respect to auspices and divination, acc. to the Roman notions, lucky, favorable, auspicious (because the Romans on these occasions turned the face towards the south, and so had the eastern or fortunate side on the left; while the Greeks, turning to the north, had it on their right." http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dsinister – Alex B. Sep 15 '12 at 00:00
  • @AlexB. In Italian "sinistra" (left, opposed to right) and "sinistro" (sinister, grim). I thought you'd be interested. :D – Alenanno Sep 15 '12 at 10:38
  • 3
    This answer addresses why "right (direction)" is related to "right (good)", but not why it is related to "right (entitlement)". – Mark Beadles Sep 15 '12 at 21:39
  • 4
    In Taiwanese Hokkien, tsiànn is the everyday morpheme for right (direction). It also means upright/straight, real, primary, or exactly (as in exactly on time). One expression for the left hand is bái-tshiú. Bái means ugly/bad. – ROBOKiTTY Sep 18 '12 at 13:28
  • 2
    In Mandarin, zuǒ is the morpheme for left (direction). It's occasionally associated with impropriety. The phrase pángmén zuǒdào, lit. 'sidedoor left-way', originally referred to unorthodox cults. It can mean any non-accepted mode of thinking today. – ROBOKiTTY Sep 18 '12 at 13:29
  • 1
    @MarkBeadles I agree: gets clear the very ancient origin of the association of left with evil and right with goodness, but still can't see how thence evolved the legal definition, which I know already existed in Medieval Romance, not sure about Latin. – Joe Pineda Jan 17 '14 at 03:27
5

The English word "right" comes from Proto-Indo-European word o̯reĝtos which meant "correct" and had cognates o̯reĝr "directive, order", o̯reĝs "king, ruler", o̯reĝti "guides, directs", o̯reĝi̯om "kingdom". The root itself meant "direct, straight" and reflected in many English words both inherited and borrowed, such as "direction", "correction", "rectum", "region".

The Russian and Polish word "pravo" originates from a different PIE root and cognate with the English word "first" and German word "Frau". The basic meaning of the root "per-" was "over", "through" as in PIE adverb peri, but later the meaning also shifted to "against" as in proti, "forward, ahead" and further to "first" as in prou̯os.

The later word, prou̯os, meaning "first" was used to designate a province headsman ("first" in the settlement), and later "judge" and "lord" (with feminine form preu̯ia̯ meaning "mistress, lady", reflected in German "Frau") and gave rise to the Slavic legal term as well as the Russian terms meaning "correct", "just".

Anixx
  • 6,643
  • 1
  • 26
  • 38
  • please, if you can, give a source for o̯reĝtos. It is intuitively reminiscent of correct, though that's traditionally analyzed as kom + h₃reǵ- + ? ... I wonder more about the suffix than the prefix. I get that your o̯ corresponds formally to h3, with different (stronger) assumptions about its phonetic qualities – vectory Dec 23 '18 at 20:09
  • Correction: That's ḱóm (the diacritics make a difference, see e.g. https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29977/). Anyhow, the question asks more than this, if it asks to compare non-IE (e.g. Arab يَسَار‎ (yasār) "left", y-s-r "easy"). Ideas for internal reconstruction of o̯reĝ-, or loans from Afro-Asiatic are welcome. I got a crazy one:cp. leviathan, left, leave, Latvian kreiss "left", crayfish" ... no wait, I meant oarfish, a.k.a. Regalecidae, never mind. German has Führungshand* "leading hand" (of sword, dance, etc.). How do Ger. prägen, brechen fit in? – vectory Dec 23 '18 at 21:59
  • @vectory h₃reǵ- is another spelling for o̯reĝ-. Regarding non-IE connections, I have nothing to say. Although be aware that Leviathan comes from the root meaning snake/serpent and has nothing to do with the left side. In PIE left-side one was *lee̯u̯os* and the same root *lee̯-* was used for lazy, let(allow), leave, etc. – Anixx Dec 24 '18 at 12:48
1

I can think of two different relations between "right" meaning a direction and "right" meaning correct.

  1. Biology: the right hand is usually stronger; it is the "right" (correct) hand to do things. The left hand is the "left" (remaining; from "leave") hand.

  2. Astronomy: in the northern hemisphere, when people get up in the morning and look to the direction of the rising sun (= east), they see it turning slightly to the right of them (= south). Keeping in mind the great importance of the sun, it is easy to understand why they regarded the right side as the "correct" side, and the left side as symbolizing darkness, wrongness and evil. Note also that in Biblical Hebrew, the same word "yamin" is used for "right" and "south", and the same word "smol" is used for "left" and "north".

I am not a linguist so I am not sure whether there is evidence to one explanation over the other.

Erel Segal-Halevi
  • 119
  • 3