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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Yep - in the northern hemisphere a sundial shadow will move from west to east in a clockwise fashion; in the southern hemisphere it still goes west to east but does so moving anticlockwise.
And if I'm thinking about this correctly, people between ~20N and ~20S latitudes will have it reverse throughout the year and and sometimes be a straight line.
Wait, it's all anglo-centric?
Always has been.
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That made me curious, so I tried to find a pre-clock synonym in Indonesian. The best answer I have is by translating "Sunwise", which became "dr kiri ke kanan" or "from left to right."
Which make sense, if something is going clockwise around you, that's what you'd see. No idea if that was a real phrase or an artifact of machine translation, though.