How did people refer to clockwise movement before the invention of the clock?
Was there an alternative adjective to "clockwise" other than "the rotation you take around left hand"?
Also, how did all watch companies around the world agree on what the direction of "clockwise" is?
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Imagine you're in the Northern Hemisphere and you face east toward the rising sun. Over the course of the day, the sun will seem to move to the south, and then set in the west. This forms a "sunwise" turn, which is what we now call "clockwise" because we made clocks in imitation of sundials.
In Swedish it's called medsols and motsols. The iteral translation is with the sun and against the sun.
Is there a large perceptible pronunciation difference? Because if not med and mot being opposites seems like it’s rife for sitcom hijinks
There is, yeah, /meːd/ and /muːt/
Thank you! That makes sense, I forgot north Germanic languages don’t do final devoicing. In German, the d would be pronounced as /t/ in that position.
You rarely hear voiced plosives in spoken German in general. Negative VOTs are virtually unheard of. The distinction would be more accurate if described as aspirated/unaspirated than unvoiced/voiced.
I guess what I wanna say is that German 'd's are most likely gonna be realized as /t/, no matter where they occur in the utterance.