Is there really any language which completely lacks words for left and right? At minimum, people want to distinguish their good hand from their bad hand, or the

Is there really any language which completely lacks words for left and right? At minimum, people want to distinguish their good hand from their bad hand, or the side of the body that has their liver from the side that has their stomach. I can't say anything for Australian aboriginal languages, but I'm quite familiar with Malayo-Polynesian languages in general (I speak Tagalog and Malay) ... and Balinese has definite words for left and right (kiwa and tengen). And you can elicit these very easily from a native Balinese speaker. Be a foreigner or an Indonesian from another island, ask "where's the bathroom" in heavily accented Balinese, then act confused if the answer has anything about geographic directions. Like I said, there's no linguistic barrier against giving directions based on left or right in Balinese. It's merely cultural. Balinese people just don't do it when talking to each other. You might say, they demonstrate solidarity with each other against outsiders by using this geographic knowledge which sets them apart. (In Honolulu, which was originally populated by very distant linguistic relatives of the Balinese, the buses run "windward" and "leeward" even in English.) And besides, it's not very deep knowledge anyway --- the direction words are literally seaward-sunriseward-mountainward-sunsetward. What's more confusing is, there's Balinese villages both north and south of the big mountain, and they all use those directional words according to their local geography. Thus the ordering of the points is different. A counterclockwise turn for a southerner and a counterclockwise turn for a northerner take them through the above-mentioned points in opposite orders. I suspect the problem with the Balinese dancer boy to which the NYT is alluding comes from the following problem: his teacher wanted him to do something in a circle and he kept going the wrong way. Which leads to the final rambling point: you'll probably notice that all the languages the NYT have mentioned are tiny ones you haven't heard of, unless you did a linguistics degree or came from the same province. I highly doubt all the big languages have always been purely egocentric-direction ones. Rather, they became that way when people who came from widely separate geographic areas had to use them with each other. It's easy to keep track of your North and South if you're in the middle of a giant desert or in a village where you've lived your whole life. It's hard if you're a merchant who sailed from the other end of the archipelago and walked down the streets of an unfamiliar port city, and so, you start asking for, and receiving, left/right directions instead.